Resolving Bluescreens in Windows 2008 R2 on Nehalem Processors

Analysis
May 29, 20104 mins

Hotfix Solves Clock Interrupt Time Interval Error

I was having nothing but problems with a new server, the system wouldn’t last more than 2 minutes without bluescreening, a phenomenon I hadn’t seen since the old Windows NT days, I was having very bad flashbacks….  I did the typical problem solving by flashing the system bios with the latest bios the hardware vendor had on their site, unloaded anything slightly squirrelly I had loaded up on the system, stripped it down to just Windows 2008 R2, but still, within a couple minutes while my HyperV guest sessions were loading up, the system would bluescreen.  Got the point where I was pretty certain it wasn’t my configuration…

I stumbled across a Microsoft knowledgebase KB article that wasn’t exactly what I was having the problem with, but pretty close.  Basically there is a “known bug” with Windows 2008R2 with Nehalem processors (which the system I was working on had an Intel Nehalem i780 processor).  The KB article is https://support.microsoft.com/kb/975530 which I downloaded the hotfix (had to do it in Safe Mode with Networking as I couldn’t even keep the server going long enough to download the hotfix without bluescreening) finally got the hotfix loaded, thing has run like a champ ever since…

While the KB article refers to a slightly different bluescreen error, the error I was getting was:

A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.

A clock interrupt was not received on a secondary processor within the allocated time interval

(etc, etc)

*** STOP: 0x00000101

I’ve setup hundreds of Windows 2008 R2 HyperV hosts, but this was the first server of the new Nehalem processor that I had, and while I had some intermittent blue screen problems on another similarly configured system, this system wouldn’t run for more than a couple minutes, long enough for me to take a photo of the screen (which in the past went so quickly that I couldn’t read the error to properly diagnose and fix the thing).

With the installation of the hotfix, ALL bluescreen problems/issues have completed disappeared.

************

Note: Before I was able to capture the bluescreen message, after the system had rebooted after the crashes, it provided an error log message that had the following, but of course this information was of little use…

Problem signature:

  Problem Event Name: BlueScreen

  OS Version: 6.1.7600.2.0.0.274.10

  Locale ID: 1033

Additional information about the problem:

  BCCode: 101

  BCP1: 0000000000000019

  BCP2: 0000000000000000

  BCP3: FFFFF88001F3F180

  BCP4: 0000000000000004

  OS Version: 6_1_7600

  Service Pack: 0_0

  Product: 274_3

Files that help describe the problem:

  C:WindowsMinidump

rand morimoto

Rand is a Microsoft MVP and security specialist with expertise in Office 365, Microsoft Azure, Exchange, SharePoint, SQL, Windows Server, Windows Client, System Center, and Lync. Rand has over 50 international bestselling books and speaks at conferences and conventions somewhere in the world every month. Rand is also the owner of the consulting firm Convergent Computing, which was Microsoft's Global Partner of the Year (2014) and an early adopter organization across all of the Microsoft products and services.

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