The nvmcp64.sys Blue Screen

This issue has been plaguing my Windows 7 installation since the beginning of time, or, well -- the beginning of this particular Windows 7 installation...

Every once in a while, my computer would blue screen displaying a DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL error due to a certain nvmcp64.sys, often with any playing audio looping the same fragment over and over again until I would grudgingly press the reset button.

DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL is one of those typical cryptic "STOP errors" that actually tell you almost nothing. The only reasonable thing to deduce is that it's probably a driver acting up, or some hardware gone bad. Searching around on forums quickly leads one to downloading Memtest86 to check if your RAM has gone bad, or to advice telling you that you should try removing your graphics card/audio card/memory/hard drives/and every other peripheral imaginable one by one, trying every possible combination of hardware until your computer boots up again or you die from boredom -- whichever comes first. Meh. Checking your memory is a good idea once in a while, but once your memory has been working for a year, chances are it will remain working perfectly until you build or buy your next machine.

Another thing you could do (especially if you've seen your fair share of blue screens) is to take a look at the  dump files Windows creates when it crashes (look in C:\Windows\Minidump\). Since we won't do that here, I won't go over the details on how to analyse these dumps. The reason why we won't explore the dump is because we already have a clear idea about which process, library, or - in this case - driver is causing the problem: nvmcp64.sys. So what is nvmcp64.sys exactly?

The prefix "nv" leads us to a plausible candidate: Nvidia! You might think that updating your graphics drivers are in order (another advice so commonly encountered), but you would be wrong, since the driver in this case is related to the nForce (Nvidia's bus architecture to handle IDE, RAID, networking and audio) chipset found on the motherboard. While searching around, some sites will advice you to disable your RAID controller or some such, which would again be incorrect, since nvmcp64.sys' job is also... to handle audio.

The solution is in fact pretty simple. Uninstall the Nvidia audio driver and go to Realtek's website to download a general AC'97 audio driver (an audio standard used by virtually any motherboard manufacturer, now replaced by Realtek's High Definition Audio standard). Realtek warns you that their general purpose drivers "may not offer the customizations made by your system/motherboard manufacturer", which is acceptable.

After doing this, audio now works fine, and the blue screens are completely gone. I've indeed lost some customizations/features offered by Nvidia (such as the record what you hear functionality), but these can be replaced by other software tools and were not really used that much by me anyway. Audio itself plays fine, without causing blue screens any longer.

MotionInJoy Appcrash When Loading Driver

When trying to install the MotioninJoy driver using the GUI, the program crashes.
Manually running the driver installation works. To do this, open a cmd window with administrative privileges. Make sure you have followed the other MotioninJoy steps and the controller is plugged in.
cd to the "ds3" directory, located in your MotioninJoy install path, e.g.:

C:\Users\Seppe>cd "C:\Installed Files\MotioninJoy\ds3"

C:\Installed Files\MotioninJoy\ds3>

Then run the driver installation program like so:

C:\Installed Files\MotioninJoy\ds3>MijCmd.exe /i drivers\MijXinput.inf
INFO: Updateing driver,Please wait a moment...

A notepad file containing log output will open, it should look something like this:

INFO:MotioninJoy Driver install log
INFO: Driver install Enter
INFO: argc0="MijCmd.exe"
INFO: argc1="/i"
INFO: argc2="drivers\mijxinput.inf"
INFO: DriverPackageInfPath="C:\Installed Files\MotioninJoy\ds3\drivers\mijxinput.inf"
INFO: >>>>>installing driver package.
LOG Event: 1, ENTER:  DriverPackageInstallW
LOG Event: 2, DRIVER_PACKAGE_LEGACY_MODE flag set but not supported on Plug and Play driver on VISTA. Flag will be ignored.
LOG Event: 1, Looking for Model Section [MotioninJoy.NTamd64.6.0]...
LOG Event: 1, Installing INF file 'C:\Installed Files\MotioninJoy\ds3\drivers\mijxinput.inf' (Plug and Play).
LOG Event: 1, Looking for Model Section [MotioninJoy.NTamd64.6.0]...
LOG Event: 1, Installing devices with Id "USB\VID_054C&PID_0268&REV_0100" using INF "C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\mijxinput.inf_amd64_neutral_452fabe792a00d17\mijxinput.inf".
LOG Event: 1, ENTER UpdateDriverForPlugAndPlayDevices...
LOG Event: 0, RETURN UpdateDriverForPlugAndPlayDevices.
LOG Event: 1, Installation was successful.
LOG Event: 1, Marked Phantom Device with Hardware/Compatible Id 'USB\VID_054C&PID_0268&REV_0100' for reinstall on next plug-in.
LOG Event: 0, Install completed
LOG Event: 1, RETURN: DriverPackageInstallW  (0x0)
SUCCESS: installed package C:\Installed Files\MotioninJoy\ds3\drivers\mijxinput.inf.

You can now use the MotioninJoy GUI again. The driver will be installed.

What A Day(s)

Warning: the following post will probably contain swearing and profanity, this is because I am very mad at the moment... sorry.

The day before yesterday, around 2 a.m.: I stop working for that day and shut down my PC.
Yesterday: I start that PC (it's my Windows machine: be prepared for anything) and see 'One of your drives has to be checked for consistency...' yadda yadda. I am not woried, this has happened before, so I think: 'A check can't be bad.'.

Yeah, right, around 50% of the first check: chkdsk hangs... I wait... I wait some more... I start looking on the Internet for some support... This is gonna be bad... I think, and I restart.

I restart and restart and restart and the check keeps locking up. So I try to cancel it and start Windows.

STOP: VOLUME_NOT_MOUNTABLE or something like that... What the fuck! Again! Windows loads this time, but the system is remarkable slow. This is bad.

I grab an XP install disk and throw it in the drive... recovery console... trying to remember that !"£$ administrator password and running checkdisk as if there's no tomorrow...

Chkdsk is performing additional checks and fixes...
Chkdsk is performing additional checks and fixes...
Chkdsk is performing additional checks and fixes...

BSOD! A BSOD for god's sake! In a setup environment! How bad can things get? UNEXPECTED_CHECK_EXCEPTION what the!

Okay: let's search for tools and trials for NTFS file checking. Back in the day, we had Norton. Then: Norton was still a friend for sysadmins. But back in the day, we also had FAT32, which was more open and more known than NTFS... (Did you know that 'NTFS Recovery' in Norton Tools today actually means: chkdsk /r /f?)

Iolo Drivemedic Stuff Thingy Trial. I install quickly before Windows locks up again.

Iolo shit has performed an illegal operation and has to... goddammit! Is this a tool or what, it doesn't even work (Windows 64 bit maybe?) After scrutinizing the install maps I find the image for a boot disk 'Which will fix every error you see and do your laundry too!', or so it says above the 'BUY ME!' button on their site.

Turns out that boot floppy (Who has floppy's lying around the house? I'm glad I had.) is the result of a night filled with passion between MSDOS and FREEDOS: crappy mouse drivers are the result.

I try navigating my way through the screens with my arrow keys, but when the second screen shows some nice circles to select the drive I want to check, Tab, Space, Enter, Arrows and all the other keys don't work! Who makes this crap? Esc: exit application. I could cry. So I search for a PS/2 mouse, and plug it in. Of course you have to restart, because the ctmouse.exe crap refuses to believe that there is a mouse (apart from the one it made up at COM1). Now the mouse works (and believe it or not, both the USB and the PS/2 mouses (or mice) work now, I don't get this). I click my drive and I am happy this problem will be solved.

( ) Fix MBR.
( ) Fix Partition Table.

No shit Sherlock. All this trouble for this? Crap Iolo tools! I have news: the only tool which is a little bit fucking usable for fixing NTFS partitions is... chkdsk. That's right, MS had kept NTFS as their little dirty closed secret and now nobody can play with it. ntfsfix on Linux tries to give a little help, but doesn't do anything either. How bad is that? So chkdsk again... now from another install CD (you never know). After spinning and crunching the drive, it spits out:

The drive has one or more unrecoverable errors...

Oh really? Time to backup stuff then. But don't try this in Windows. You see, when you drag and drop some files, 10 files for example, and number 5 can't get copied for some reason, then it drops all the next 5 too, so you can spend some hours figuring out which file is giving you problems.

Luckily there is XCOPY, with it's /c flag (if i remember correctly) to continue copying if an error occurs, CLI tools still are the best tools. The only thing is that when there was an error: the whole fucking OS just crashed or froze. Great.

But never I will give up my 9GB of important documents and data!

I turn every CD and DVD I can find around: Knoppix 4.something, yes!

I boot Knoppix (lovely DVD that is) and prepare for some copying. Of course, you can't write to other NTFS files, so I had to copy my files over the network to my laptop. I boot up SSH server and in Knoppix I try:

scp -rpv /mnt/sda1/Documents\ and\ Settings/Yaddayaddayadda myuser@192.168.111.5:/home/myuser/backup

Which works. On some file I get an output/input error but at least it doesn't crash and saves what it can...

Until... a large file came up... '- STALLED -'. What does that mean? The network isn't down, is it? I try a quick ifconfig on Knoppix: only lo? Where has eth0 gone?

Turns out, if you use a nForce motherboard, it causes scp and sftp to crap out (or the other way around?). You have to turn your PC off and then turn it on again to recognize the eth0 again. (Restart? Forget it!)

A Windows Share, then, I start Samba (which is easy in Knoppix) and connect with my Laptop. I successfully copy the remaining files... (That was a few hours ago.)

Now I really want to know what has caused this behaviour. Since Scandisk Surface Scan isn't around anymore and replace with chkdsk over there, I try
badblocks -c 16000 -s -v -o ./out /dev/sda1

Holy cow: are all these bad blocks? This drive is only three (3!) years old! Name to blame: Maxtor. I hope it's still under warranty. Never I will buy their shitty drives again, never! So at the end: it wasn't really Windows' fault, but they could've made my job a lot easier.

Now I can go through the process of installing Windows all over again once more... I'm gonna take an aspirin now.

What have we learned?

• Backup!
• Download the newest Knoppix DVD and burn it now!
• Maxtor is shitty.
• The only tool we have for fixing NTFS files and indexes and attributes is chkdsk.
• Luckily there's Linux, and SSH.

... goddammit!