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Using Driver Verifier
About Driver Verifier
Driver Verifier is a utility belonging to Windows which performs sanity checks, verifications and provocations on running kernel drivers as a means to find bugs and errors. It
performs a wide range of thorough checks by injecting faults and simulating edge conditions in the system. All drivers running
in the system including those running under the supervision of Driver Verifier are expected to be able to handle such faults and conditions. If a driver fails to pass the
conditions imposed by Driver Verifier, a bugcheck report with detailed information of the problem will be written out. This bugcheck report will be picked up by WhoCrashed, the next time
it is run after the system has crashed and rebooted. Driver Verifier is included in all versions of Microsoft Windows. All drivers which have passed the Windows Logo program must have passed Driver Verifier checks.
When to use Driver Verifier
Driver 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 that 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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