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Windows XP Starter Edition Snubs P4, Athlon
Apu writes "CNET is reporting that Microsoft's Windows XP Starter Edition operating system specifically checks the result of the CPUID instruction on bootup and fails to continue if a Pentium 4 or Athlon processor is detected."
Of course when the machine is in such a mess that it decides to blue-screen you're probably not going to trust it to write a file.
After all it might have crashed because it encountered a strange filesystem error - and writing to it could trash your whole disk.
There have been similar suggestions for the Linux Kernel; write information somewhere when the kernel panics, but they are usually shot down for the same reason.
When a machine is in the 'panic' state writing to the local disks, or sending stuff across the network isn't usually feasible. (True some people have done it but its a hard problem - because you can't actually rely upon the kernel to do anything correctly when it's mid-panic).
The Mac OS X writes data to the machine's NVRAM on kernel panic, which is then retrievable and interpretable once the system reboots.
-ben
myselfmusic
Of course when the machine is in such a mess that it decides to blue-screen you're probably not going to trust it to write a file.
Yes but it *can* safely write to swap space. On the next boot (I think!) it'll pull the crash dump out of swap and saves it in your windows folder for analysis. System Properties, Advanced, Startup and Recovery, Write debugging information. On XP and 2003 it'll then look at the crash and either point you to a web page with help on the STOP error or, if it doesn't recognise the crash, it'll ask permission to upload the memory dump to Microsoft.
This does mean you need at least as much swap space on the system drive as you have memory for a full dump - which can be a problem if you've deliberately taken a small system partition, as our co-lo host used to do by default.
When you direct NT to make a memory dump on BSOD, it uses disk space already reserved for the pagefile. You need to have a page file on the boot volume large enough to hold whatever size memory dump. Since the sectors are already allocated, it's as simple as writing memory directly into them; the filesystem need not be involved for this. The next time the system boots, it copies the memory dump contents into a new file (which is now safe to create) before the pagefile is used for paging again. Another area is pre-allocated to hold space for a crash event in the event log.