Windows 2000 Administration in a Nutshell

Name

recovery options

Synopsis

Specify what will happen if the operating system halts unexpectedly.

Procedures

When the operating system halts unexpectedly, a blue screen called a stop screen is typically displayed. The information on this screen can be used by qualified Microsoft support technicians to determine the cause of the failure. Recovery options let you specify what actions will occur when a fatal system error occurs:

Start → Settings → Control Panel → System → Advanced → Startup and Recovery

You can then specify:

• Whether an event will be written to the system log when the error occurs. This error can then be displayed after rebooting by using the Event Viewer console (this is assuming that you are able to reboot the system).

• Whether an alert message will be sent to administrators when the error occurs.

• Whether the contents of system memory will be dumped to a log file when the error occurs. By default, this log file is C:\Winnt\memory.dmp. A complete memory dump requires enough free disk space to contain all of physical memory (RAM) plus an additional 1MB. To reduce the size of the dump log, you can select Write kernel information only. Microsoft support technicians can then analyze your dump log to help determine the cause of the crash.

• Whether to reboot automatically after the other recovery actions are performed.

The first two options on the previous list only work if part of the pagefile is located on the boot partition and this portion is equal to at least the amount of physical ...