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How do you 'capture' a BSOD?

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nosh:
I recently faced some hardware issues with my dual monitor setup. Anytime I ran a graphics intensive program the display would get garbled before completely freezing, forcing me to hit the power button. On one of these occasions when I waited a little longer to reset the PC, a BSOD flashed very briefly and the PC complete froze again with a garbled display. I tried to emulate this a few times with a camera in my hand (feeling like a complete idiot, as you may have guessed) and having absolutely no luck. The problem was finally sorted out Spoilerby pulling out & reconnecting the RAM and graphics card and also connecting my primary monitor to the non-DVI outlet without the VGA-DVI adapter, I still don't know what exactly was at fault but the PC is running glitchlessly for several days now
but maybe I could have solved the matter a lot earlier if I could have viewed the BSOD. Are these pretty babies recorded somewhere (I looked for error.log or similarly named files to no avail) or is there some other way of getting this info?

Josh:
I cannot seem to find a homepage for it anymore, but bluesave would let you save the blue screen information.

Another solution is that you can use the event viewer, start - run - eventvwr.msc, and look in the system log for "Bug Check" listings. This contains four hex codes. The second hex code can be looked up using the Windows Debugging Tools. This program contains a help file which has a section to lookup all of the bug check codes.

nosh:
Thanks, Josh. I did look at the Event Viewer (thought I mentioned it in my post but apparently it got lost in an edit) and it didn't have any info relating to the crashes. Will look into Bluesave and the debugging tools.

Josh:
Like I said, look for an entry under "System" labeled BugCheck

It should contain information similar to such:

The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck.  The bugcheck was: 0x1000008e (0xc0000005, 0x99621f07, 0xad5ff9a4, 0x00000000). A dump was saved in: C:\Windows\Minidump\Mini121507-02.dmp.
--- End quote ---

This will tell you the code. The first number 0x10000008e is the bug check code. This one indicates a KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLDED bugcheck. Again, in combination with the bluesave utility and the debugging tools, I feel this could help you.

nosh:
Duly noted. The crashes happened around two weeks back, I cleared out the previous logs between crashes and investigated every single entry in the event viewer thereafter. I'm pretty certain there weren't any 'BugCheck' entries there. Thanks again.

PS: I get the fact that I can't use the Debugging Tools if I don't actually have a bugcheck code to refer, sorry if I wasn't clear earlier.

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