Notes about NMI_HARDWARE_FAILURE
Saturday, December 23rd, 2006WinDbg help states that NMI_HARDWARE_FAILURE (0×80) bugcheck 80 indicates a hardware fault. This description can easily lead to a conclusion that a kernel or complete crash dump you just got from your customer doesn’t worth examining. But hardware malfunction is not always the case especially if your customer mentions that their system was hanging and they forced a manual dump. Here I would advise to check whether they have a special hardware for debugging purposes, for example, a card or an integrated iLO chip (Integrated Lights-Out) for remote server administration. Both can generate NMI (Non Maskable Interrupt) on demand and therefore bugcheck the system. If this is the case then it is worth examining their dump to see why the system was hanging.
- Dmitry Vostokov -