Windows 98SE Blue Screen of Death with the kerneld.w9x (LLKD)

[MrMateczko]

Hello!

I use Windows 98SE on a regular basis, and I love AIDA64, as it's the most comprehensive hardware utility available for this legacy OS by far with lots of features.

I admire that you still support such legacy OS. (even if the installer doesn't work any more, I use the portable ZIP version)

However, on many machines I've tried 98SE on, AIDA64 causes a BSOD while "Checking processor speed" (or something similar) at the start up. The BSOD tells something about LLKD, and I know it's the VXD driver named kerneld.w9x that enables the hardware identification like old CPU-Z versions and HWiNFO32 do.

I don't know what causes this BSOD, on my ThinkPad T40, AIDA64 works fine, but on other machines, it doesn't. I've tried older AIDA64 versions, but to no avail. When i remove kerneld.w9x, AIDA64 works fine, but there's no hardware details :/

Can it even be fixed? Thanks in advance, and keep up the great work with AIDA64!

[Fiery]

Please let me know on what processor(s) does AIDA64 cause a BSoD.  We need to narrow this down in order to let us try and replicate the issue on one of our test systems.

[MrMateczko]

Hello!

I finally got around to test this further, count me lazy

Here's the BSOD in question, in case it might be useful to fix the problem:

(I use Polish version, as I'm from Poland, the BSOD codes should be the same )

The BSOD, as far as I know, only occurs when I have NVIDIA 98SE video drivers installed. When I uninstall these particular video drivers, the BSOD goes away.
I've tried older versions of the drivers, but this didn't help.

The BSOD has occurred on these systems:

1. AMD Athlon 64 3000+ / ASRock K8Upgrade-NF3 / GeForce 6800 GT / NVIDIA drivers installed

2. Intel Pentium G4560 / ASRock H110M-DVS R3.0 / GeForce 7900 GTO / NVIDIA drivers installed

The BSOD does not appear on my laptop:

IBM ThinkPad T40 / Intel Pentium M 1.5GHz / Radeon Mobility 7500 / latest Radeon drivers for 98SE installed

[Fiery]

Thank you.  Please let me know the version of ForceWare drivers that you have installed on your first 2 systems.

[MrMateczko]

I do not have the first AMD system anymore, I've definitely tried versions 82.69, 81.98, 81.85, and 77.72 on it.

On the second system I use 82.69.

82.69 drivers were not officially released, they can be found here: http://www.mdgx.com/files/nv8269.php

[MrMateczko]

I've switched to the VBEMP generic VGA drivers for Win9x.

You can find it here:

http://bearwindows.zcm.com.au/vbe9x.htm

And as expected, AIDA64 works wonderfully with this driver. It's only NVIDIA drivers that cause the BSOD, or at least I've confirmed it now.

[Fiery]

On ‎2017‎. ‎12‎. ‎14‎. at 7:45 PM, MrMateczko said:

I've switched to the VBEMP generic VGA drivers for Win9x.

You can find it here:

http://bearwindows.zcm.com.au/vbe9x.htm

And as expected, AIDA64 works wonderfully with this driver. It's only NVIDIA drivers that cause the BSOD, or at least I've confirmed it now.

Thank you. We've built a system with a GeForce 7900 GS video card, using Windows 98 SE and the unofficial ForceWare 82.69 drivers you've linked above, but we haven't been able to reproduce the BSoD.  For us everything worked smoothly.  Please let me know at which place (which page) in AIDA64 do you get the BSoD.

[MrMateczko]

AIDA64 crashes at the startup splash screen when it says: "Checking the speed of the processor".

Try to install KernelEx from here. I use it, maybe it's the cause of the problem?

Here you can download it: https://sourceforge.net/projects/kernelex/files/

[Fiery]

1 hour ago, MrMateczko said:

AIDA64 crashes at the startup splash screen when it says: "Checking the speed of the processor".

Try to install KernelEx from here. I use it, maybe it's the cause of the problem?

Here you can download it: https://sourceforge.net/projects/kernelex/files/

We'll check it soon. Meanwhile, please try to download AIDA64 Engineer, and use the following command-line to start it:

AIDA64.EXE /STARTUPLOG

It should create a log file on your Windows Desktop.  Please attach the file to a forum post here in this topic, so we can check where exactly the startup process breaks down.

[MrMateczko]

Hello!

Here's the log:

 

StartupLog.txt

[MrMateczko]

Any progress so far?

[Fiery]

On ‎2018‎. ‎01‎. ‎09‎. at 7:36 PM, MrMateczko said:

Any progress so far?

I'm afraid we are still unable to reproduce the issue on your test systems, even with KernelEx installed  

[MrMateczko]

I now have a GeForce 6600 GT 128MB PCI-E GPU in the system, sadly, the BSOD still appears under Windows 98 SE.

Can it be due to the CPU being too new, or the GPU being on PCI-E?

[Fiery]

On ‎12‎/‎14‎/‎2018 at 8:07 PM, MrMateczko said:

I now have a GeForce 6600 GT 128MB PCI-E GPU in the system, sadly, the BSOD still appears under Windows 98 SE.

Can it be due to the CPU being too new, or the GPU being on PCI-E?

Quite frankly, I have no idea   We've tried to reproduce the issue with the same CPU and same video card than what you've got, and it works flawlessly for us.

[timjosten]

On 12/19/2018 at 5:34 PM, Fiery said:

Quite frankly, I have no idea   We've tried to reproduce the issue with the same CPU and same video card than what you've got, and it works flawlessly for us.

You probably couldn't reproduce it because you had some background windows opened. If you start AIDA64 using a desktop shortcut and there are no other opened windows at all, it will always crash. But if you have any other window opened (even the Calculator), then AIDA64 starts without an issue.

Windows 9x is weird... and always was)

And yes, it crashes on a vanilla Windows 98SE

I was testing AIDA64 4.00 version