Kbase 18221: How to Troubleshoot General Protection Faults (GPF)
| Autor |
Progress Software Corporation - Progress |
| Acesso |
Público |
| Publicação |
11/11/2004 |
|
Status: Verified
GOAL:
How to Troubleshoot General Protection Faults (GPF)
FACT(s) (Environment):
Windows 32 Intel
Window NT 32 Intel/Windows 2000
FIX:
General Protection Faults (GPFs) are amongst the most difficult Windows problems to troubleshoot. These errors can be caused by many different things, including both hardware and software problems. Here are some of the more common causes that we have seen at Progress Technical Support.
1) A corrupted Progress executable (PROGRESS.EXE or PROWIN.EXE) -- To fix that, either re-install Progress or restore from backup. (Note that in Progress 8.2 and later you must first uninstall Progress and then install again as new.)
2) A corrupted Dynamic Link Library file (.DLL) or a needed .DLL file that was replaced when installing a piece of software produced by a company other than Progress -- It is not unusual to install Progress and have it running properly and then installing a new program made by someone else will cause problems within Progress. Another cause of corrupted .DLL files is any abnormal power loss or any lockup of the system that forces a Control-Alt-Delete sequence or a power off/reset. Corrupted or erroneous .DLL files are difficult to troubleshoot as there are many, many .DLL files within Windows. Simply re-installing Progress will fix the problem, however, as the installation will copy all the .DLL files needed by Progress back to the hard disk.
3) Memory problems
4) Device driver problems -- Make sure that you are using the device drivers provided by the manufacturers of your video board, network card, sound card or any other unique hardware you may have. The manufacturer-supplied device drivers will almost always work better than the generic drivers supplied by Microsoft and will generally operate faster than Microsoft's drivers. Video drivers seem to be the cause of many GPF errors. In many cases, downloading and installing the latest drivers from the video board manufacturer's Web site will solve the problem.
If you are using Windows NT, look in the NT Event Viewer for any abnormal conditions reported there. The NT Event Viewer does a nice job of capturing and storing error information. Some of the above problems will report detailed error entries to the NT Event Viewer. Unfortunately, there is no such capability in Windows 98, Windows 95 or Windows 3.1.
If all of the above fail, you can do more troubleshooting by obtaining a number of Dr.Watson error reports. Dr.Watson is a utility supplied by Microsoft that will intercept a GPF failure and take a "snapshot" of various registers and a Stack Back Trace that can be useful to determine which software module
caused the error. Consult the Microsoft documentation for instructions on how to run Dr.Watson. You generally need to obtain several Dr.Watson error reports in order to determine the cause of GPF errors. The Dr.Watson error logs are written
to disk and can be sent to Progress Software Corporation Technical Support or other support organizations via e-mail,if necessary.