How to properly debug a system freeze without any logging?

[ProclaimDragon]

I'm having a really strange issue, system freeze, that I have no idea how to debug cause I've already tried numerous things and the problems persists...

The problem:

I've been using Windows Vista since it was out and I use VMware Workstation to install and user other OS's, like Windows or Linux. The Windows guests work fine, the Linux ones, not so good. I've been a Gentoo user for a couple of years and it's working, so far, as a guest on VMware. But I'm sick of it and decided to try Arch (I like distros where I can choose exactly what to install); this distro doesn't work so good on my laptop under VMware. Before describing the problem, let me say that a couple of years ago I also tried Ubuntu on VMware and the problem that I'm currently having with Arch, I had it before with Ubuntu.

The problem is that after installation of the OS (Arch in this case), after logging in into the console (no X or GNOME installed so far) I start to type anything into the (doesn't matter what) and the whole system (host) freezes. It doesn't crash, it's not a BSOD, it just hangs, stops responding. I can't move the mouse, nor type anything, I have to forcibly shut the laptop down. This my problem...

What's funny is that this doesn't happen, at all, with Gentoo; which I've been running for a couple of years like I said. This also doesn't happen if I use VirtualBox instead of VMware Workstation. VirtualBox runs Arch just fine (please, doesn't suggest me to use VirtualBox, I don't like it and there's no need to go into details right now). At first I though the problem was on VMware's end but now I don't think so...

What was tried:

I went into VMware's communities forums and some people suggested me a couple of things, VMware related. None of them fixed the problem...

Then I become desperate and decided to make a full backup of my HDD current state and started to uninstall application by application and testing in between to see if Arch freezed the system. Nothing, it freezed every time...

Time for a new approach, do a clean OS install, update every driver and Windows updates, install VMware and see if the problem exists. I could have gone with Vista, but I decided to do a clean install of XP instead. No dice, the problem was still there. I actually tested before installing any Windows updates (installed from an SP2 disk) and any driver updates; this froze the system as before. I then installed SP3, updated everything else, including the drivers and tested again, nope, still freezes.

New suggestion from the VMware forums was to test for memory problems and so I used the Windows Memory Diagnostics Tool but it did not report any problems (I'm going to test old RAM I have lying somewhere which was the original RAM on my laptop-- currently, I have the double I used to have-- and see if the problem is still there).

Help needed...

Now I need help... I've tested everything I could in a software level. Doing a clean install should be a enough to test in such a case and the problem was still there. This means the problem is on the hardware level and for some reason, VMware doesn't handle it very well where VirtualBox does. And just for the record, I tested the same Arch ISO on a friend's laptop running the same VMware version and it worked just fine on his machine.

So, if I happen to find out that the problem is not the RAM, what could it possibly be? How am I ever going to find out the issue being this to think if there's a way to solve it or not? I have no more ideas, I don't know what else to do...

The VMware full debug logs doesn't show anything, the last printed line on the logs are before the system freeze. Windows Event Viewer doesn't show anything either... I also tried to look inside the virtual machines logs, but there was nothing there too...

I have no idea what to do now.

Any suggestions?

[jnelsoninjax]

this might be worth a shot, download WhoCrashed. this gives a nice GUI to windows debugging tools and reads the crash logs and tells you what (if anything) has caused your system to crash. Hope it works! :)

[ProclaimDragon]

  Jonathan Nelson said:

this might be worth a shot, download WhoCrashed. this gives a nice GUI to windows debugging tools and reads the crash logs and tells you what (if anything) has caused your system to crash. Hope it works! :)

Doesn't report anything because the system doesn't crash, there are no crash dumps...

  Quote

Crash dump directory: C:\Windows\Minidump

Crash dumps are enabled on your computer.

No crash dumps have been found on your computer

The system just freezes and I have to press the power off button for a few seconds to turn it off...

[jnelsoninjax]

OK, is it possible to load windows into safe mode? I would think that the system freezing is indicative of a program being loaded at start-up. I know that windows loads start-up programs through the users local start-up folder, and also the registry

(HKEY_Local_machine\software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\run)

also check out msconfig.exe (either load from Start, Run or just type msconfig into the search box) check out the startup tab, this should be the complete list of what is being loaded at boot! Other then that I'm at a lose for what would be freezing your system!

[+allan MVC]

  Jonathan Nelson said:

OK, is it possible to load windows into safe mode? I would think that the system freezing is indicative of a program being loaded at start-up. I know that windows loads start-up programs through the users local start-up folder, and also the registry

(HKEY_Local_machine\software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\run)

As well as: HKEY_Current User\software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\run

MSCONFIG (or a utility that manages startup programs) will list all items starting with your system.

[ProclaimDragon]

I've already tried to disable all of the non-Microsoft, non-Default startup entries and/or services and the result was the same... :(

[ProclaimDragon]

Someone helped me debug the problem and I used Windows Driver Verifier to produce a BSoD crash when any driver problems were identified. This happened while powering the Arch Linux virtual machine in VMware. After that, an analysis was done to the kernel crash dump with WinDbg to look for culprit. The conclusion was that the problem lies on the VMware virtualization driver.

There's nothing anyone else can do but the VMware support team. I happened to have a student license from the "VMware Academic Program" and as such, I don't have direct contact with the support team. I've already contacted my university's IT department to see if there's anyway they can contact VMware support to solve this issue.

Thanks to everyone that tried to help.