Occasional Bootup BSOD with Snapman.Sys

Ron,

It does sometimes happen, but it's not that common. Most of the time snapman causes a BSOD it isn't a "somtimes" thing. It usually totally stops the user from booting into Windows. This then requires restoring an image taken from before the problem or manually removing/correcting the problem.

It's possible that the snapman version is different than what DD expects or that it's conflicting with something else on the system. Have you tried reinstalling DD to see if it helps? For example, if you had previously installed a newer version of TI, snapman would have been updated.

Do you have any other imaging programs installed in Windows? Most imaging programs install their own snapshot driver and they don't always play nice together.

For me, it has been a 'sometimes' thing. The BSOD occurs after logon and before my desktop startup programs have finished loading. The 2nd bootup usually works fine, but the conflicting driver has always been snapman.sys as noted. This box has never had TI installed, only DD10 , and the snapman.sys seems to be current with DD 10. The reason there is no TI software is that I switched away after TI 8 (for various reasons) to a competitor which does use 'phylock' for a filtering driver. However, DD has always worked well for my needs, having 1 primary and an extended partition with 4-5 volumes. Phylock has never been noted in the dump. Have never had to reimage because of a BSOD on this laptop. I've considered the competitor's partitioning product, but it seems intimidating compared to DD. However, uninstalling DD requires regedit work as well, as documented by Acronis and others. Maybe it is Phylock vs. Snapman and the latter gets noted in the mini-dump.

It's just weird to me that it always recovers successfully from these BSOD's. It's like the random nature of the way some software is being loaded or being rearranged by the OS or ??? I usually don't do restarts unless required by some application software which requires it, that's when it sometimes occurs. If I do a reboot, say after an imaging process outside Windows, then Windows bootup is fine. So it seems to have to do with how/when new software is loaded/started up.

Ron

The snapman driver does sometimes cause problems with other other snapshot drivers, but those problems seem to usually result in drives not being seen, errors during backups, and things like that. I suppose there could be occasional BSOD's, though, since it has been known to cause them even by itself at times.

Did you have DD installed for a while before you installed the other program? If so, do you remember if there was ever a snapman BSOD during that time?

DD 10 was one of the 1st programs installed July, 2010 when setting up this laptop on pre-installed Windows XP Professional, since I had it on a prior box, but that laptop also had TI 8 as well, unlike this one.

So, what I call 'recoverable' bootup BSOD's existed intermittently from the get go. I only recently became aware of Nirsoft Launcher's BlueScreen Analyzer tool to look a bit more at the BSOD detail and that's when snapman.sys was indicated in every single BSOD in the history of this configuration. Go figure. Not a big hassle, since it always recovers. And the competitive imaging product works really well, as I did reimage recently my C drive after patches to SP3 started giving me runtime BSOD's periodically which did NOT involve snapman.sys. Couldn't live with that, so backtracked to prior environment.

Thanks much for trying to help analyze this.

If that's the case, it sounds like the problem is just that version of snapman on that system. Do you know exactly what version it is? You should be able to check the file's properties and tell. I could check if it's correct for the build you have installed.

There is also a later build of DD 10 (2288). I don't know if it uses a different version of snapman than 2239, though.

I should have checked versions at Acronis. I thought I had the latest build. B-2239 is September,2009, 5 months earlier release, but B-2288 is March, 2010. The list of fixes in B-2288 don't indicate any fixes for the issue I'm having however.

Interestingly, though, the DD10 B-2239 I am already running (and have used) on fixed some corruption issues on Lenovo laptops, which is what I have!

My current snapapi and snapman.sys are 3.6.0.446, as in the dumps. I'll download the later DD 10 build and see if later snapman.sys and snapapi are updated. It's a long shot, but, hopefully can't hurt to reinstall. Do I have to uninstall the prior version first? Cautious because of what I've read about snapman.sys and uninstalls.

Thanks!

Ron

You shouldn't need to uninstall the old version first. I'm still showing version 3.6.0.446 in build 2288, so it probably didn't change (I say probably because there have been cases where the file changes and the version doesn't).

You are right, neither snapapi or snapman changed, not even the creation date. Oh well, the install went fine, and I rebooted just to test w/o a hitch. Usually reboot works fine if no new software has been added, as I've noted.

It's a tolerable situation, and DD 10 works well for me on Windows XP, but, when/if Windows 7 comes, ...I'll have to upgrade the product.

Thanks so much for your tireless, continuing help on this forum.

Ron