Driver Verifier is a utility which performs sanity checks, verifications and provocations on
running kernel drivers as a means to find bugs on them. It performs a wide range of thorough checks and does fault injection on selected drivers. Driver
Verifier is included in all version of Windows since Windows 2000. All drivers which have passed the Windows Logo program must have
passed Driver Verifier checks.
When to use Driver Verifier
Verifier can be used to find offending thid party drivers in case no responsbible third party drivers have been indicated after a crash analysis. It will
help provoke existing bugs in drivers and make it more easy for them to crash. If there is a case which is hard to reproduce, then Driver Verifier
may be useful. Also if a driver crashes because of verifiers special actions, a crash dump will be generated by the system which provides a lot of useful information
that can be used by WhoCrashed to provide the root cause of the problem.
How to start Driver Verifier
Click Start then Run and type verifier.exe. Unless you have knowledge of the Windows kernel, it is suggested you run verifier with
standard settings and enable it on all suspected third party drivers. The system needs to be restarted after settings have been applied.
Using Driver Verifier
After restarting your system with verifier enabled, it is much more likely to bug check soon. The system might crash already during the boot phase. After you have experienced one or several system
crashes with Driver Verifier run WhoCrashed again. WhoCrashed will likely provide you more useful information about the root cause of the system
crash and give you better suggestions on how to solve it. Switch off Driver Verifier when you are done with it. Due to the many sanity checks and
fault injections it dramatically impacts system performance so it's not suggested to normally operate your computer while verifier is running unless this
is required to provoke a system crash.
If your system crashes all the time
If you cannot get access to your system because it crashes all the time or even during the boot phase with verifier enabled, you may
need to boot your system into safe-mode to switch off verifier.
More information on using Driver Verifier
Please check the following MSDN article:
Driver Verifier.
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