Driver Developer's Toolbox, Part 4: The Checked Build

re: Driver Developer's Toolbox, Part 4: The Checked Build

Steve Dispensa — Sun, 31 Oct 2004 19:21:00 GMT

Yes, VMWare drivers sucks... They do a VERY STUPID thing, they fill the non used dispatch table entries with NULL.

re: Driver Developer's Toolbox, Part 4: The Checked Build

Steve Dispensa — Wed, 29 Sep 2004 17:26:00 GMT

You know, I completely forgot to point to that article, but it is a great one. I believe it appeared in the 50+ page NT Insider I got last month too. The whole thing is totally worth a read.

I'm just too lazy (for whatever reason) to set up a boot.ini, but as I think about it, it's like 15 seconds of extra work, so that's probably short-sighted on my part.

Thanks for the feedback!

re: Driver Developer's Toolbox, Part 4: The Checked Build

Steve Dispensa — Wed, 29 Sep 2004 13:51:00 GMT

Note that you don't have to overwrite ntoskrnl.exe and hal.dll, boot.ini is happy to let you specify an alternate kernel and HAL. Just extract the checked versions to %SystemRoot%\System32\ntoskrnl.chk and %SystemRoot%\System32\hal.chk and add "/kernel=ntosknrl.chk /hal=hal.chk" to your boot.ini. You can find more detailed info under "Installing Just the Checked Operating System and HAL" in the DDK.

By doing it this way you have an easy way to back out if you happened to grab the wrong checked images (which happens to me a lot nowadays with all of the hotfixes).

-scott
OSR