Sometimes in support you’ll be asked to collect a boot trace to help troubleshoot slow boot or slow logon scenarios. The symptoms are a long time passes from startup to the CTRL+ALT+DEL or from CTRL+ALT+DEL to a usable desktop experience. This blog will walk you through the steps needed to do this. While you can… Continue reading How to collect a boot trace on Windows 10 using xbootmgr
Tag: trace
Windows 10 20H2 boot trace – dropped events
TLDR: At time of writing, Windows 10 20H2 has a bug where the default buffer allocations in boot tracing are inadequate to capture the data of a boot trace. The fix is pretty simple, use good old xbootmgr instead. This is a binary from the older ADK and gets installed when you install the current… Continue reading Windows 10 20H2 boot trace – dropped events
How To: Collect ETL/WPT tracing diagnostics when you can never logon to the host.
First, guess who's back?! Me! I left Microsoft of my own accord last year. I came back. I wrote this about my experience, I hope you enjoy it. There and back again, an IT tale… Anyways, I was asked a few times recently, Dude, how do you collect an ETW trace for boot/logon if the… Continue reading How To: Collect ETL/WPT tracing diagnostics when you can never logon to the host.
What does a good boot look like (aka, what should I be happy with)?
It’s a question I wasn’t prepared for in class last week, but one that made sense really. For the IT Pro that doesn’t eat breath and sleep this stuff, what does a good or ‘fair’ trace look like? Something like this: What we are looking at here is a boot up that finishes before 45… Continue reading What does a good boot look like (aka, what should I be happy with)?
How to collect a trace for audio or video problems in Windows 7
Assume the following: You have a Windows 7 host that you want to collect a trace from. The user complains of audio issues, stuttering, latency, etc…or video frame rate is low. Something annoying. Like my previous post, lets cover a few basic rules here as we get started: 1. If host = Windows 7 AND… Continue reading How to collect a trace for audio or video problems in Windows 7
How to collect a good boot trace on Windows 7
Assume the following: You have a Windows 7 host that you want to collect a trace from. A good trace. One that you know other people will be able to decipher as well as yourself. Maybe I’ve asked you to collect a boot trace so I can look at it and pointed you to this… Continue reading How to collect a good boot trace on Windows 7
The dude does xperf…
So the Dude (that’s me) has gone over how to collect xperf traces a few times now, but what do we do after we’ve collected a solid .etl file you may ask? Well, that’s what this post is all about. This is how the Dude does it. The Dude you see is listening to Simple… Continue reading The dude does xperf…
The Dude’s Greatest Hits
As requested by several customers, I’m putting up a list of tools I find useful in troubleshooting, etc… First up…. Data Gathering I use the following tools to gather data from systems. Each has its own place, much like a mechanic has many tools, so does the average engineer… PFE MPS Reports. I use these… Continue reading The Dude’s Greatest Hits
How to collect a netmon 3.4 and xperf kernel trace and stop when a problem occurs.
So at a customer location the following question was posed to me: “In our VDI environment, how do we capture trace information? How can we set a capture for the network and xperf the user can start (or logon script the start) and then give them a link to click when a random non-reproducible problem… Continue reading How to collect a netmon 3.4 and xperf kernel trace and stop when a problem occurs.