You are the desktop administrator for your company’s sales department. You need to perform a clean installation of Windows XP Professional on a computer that currently runs Windows 98. You start the installation. The text-based portion of Setup finishes successfully. Before the GUI-based portion of Setup starts, the computer stops responding. You investigate and discover that there is a problem with a device driver. You want to know which device is causing the problem. What should you do?
A.
Modify the Boot.ini file to include the /fastdetect switch.
B.
Modify the Boot.ini file to include the /sos switch.
C.
Restart Setup by using the /dudisable switch.
D.
Restart Setup by using the /dushare switch.
E.
Restart the computer. From the Recovery console, read the Dr. Watson log.
F.
Restart the computer. From the Recovery console, read the Comsetup.log file.
Explanation:
When trying to troubleshoot startup problems with Windows XP (or Windows 2000/NT), in particular when the system hangs at reboot as in this scenario, we should use the "/SOS switch in the boot.ini startup file. This switch causes the names of drivers to be displayed as they load during boot.
Incorrect Answers:
A: The /fastdetect switch is used by default. It makes the early boot process, NTDETECT, skip the detection of parallel and serial devices (Plug and Play will find
them). This makes booting faster. You cannot configure the /fastdetect switch to log information on device drivers.
C: The /dudisable switch is used to configure if dynamic update should be run at setup. If latest patches should be downloaded from the Microsoft Web site. The /dudisable switch will not help finding the problematic device driver.
D: The /dushare switch is used to with winnt32.exe to Deploy the Windows XP Dynamic Update packages. It will not help you find the device driver which causes problems.
E: Dr. Watson logs application crashes. Dr. Watson log files do not contain information on device drivers.
F: The Comsetup.log file is created during the installation process, but it contains Comsetup.log COM+ information, not information on device drivers.
Press, Redmond, 2002, Chapter 2, Lesson 2