What's a physical memory dump?

[Superman]

My PC is still having some problems, and this time when it blue screened it said "physical memory dump" and had some kind of counter running. What is that?

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

My PC is still having some problems, and this time when it blue screened it said "physical memory dump" and had some kind of counter running. What is that?

This is the fairly standard Blue Screen of Death that takes place when Windows crashes so hard that the only thing it can do is write the contents of physical memory to a dumpfile and then halt the CPU. In theory, someone with enough patience and technical skill can look through the entire log file (written entirely in hex) and see what went wrong. Except it doesn't record everything needed, so it's actually more useless than anything.

[phongn]

Well, you can configure Windows to dump the entire memory rather than just the first 32MB or whatnot and there are tools to analyze it (usually pointing to a badly-written driver).

[Slartibartfast]

Usually Windows takes longer to boot up after such a crash. I think it might possibly use that file to figure out what files need closing and other recovery shit and whatnot.

[Defiant]

The only time I've gotten the dreaded BSOD (blue screen of death) is when I've installed a very crappy video driver. Make sure the driver is legit.

[Uraniun235]

Every once in awhile when I boot up, after getting to the desktop Windows 2K will BSOD on me telling me there was a cock-up involving the driver for the RAID controller on my motherboard (I recognize the filename it spits out). Unfortunately I'm running the newest driver for it and I need the controller to run two of my hard drives, so I'm just stuck having to deal with a BSOD every 20th bootup or so.