Dellness

[Mercutio]

I have before me a great mystery.

It is a Dell XPS 600. 3GHz P4, 2GB RAM. nVidia-based motherboard, GF6800.
It has XP Media Center on it.

It also has well over 30GB of installed PROGRAMS. I mean a 27GB program files directory. Only about 4GB of user data, but every fucking program known to man. Many of them look like the sorts of things that are sold in spam advertisements, but the PC is actually clean of any spyware.

It generates a IRQ Less than Not Equal BSOD if you attempt to Restart it.

Which is usually a driver error so I loaded current drivers for every component in the system.

Still BSODs.

Fine. Go in Device Manager, disable everything. Turn as much stuff off in the BIOS as I can.
OK... the IRQ Less than not Equal BSOD goes away. It's replaced by a BSOD originating in sonypvl3.sys, which I've found is a non-plug and play device driver that can't be uninstalled or disabled. And I can't find anything about what it actually does. Sonypvl3.sys does not seem to be present on other XP machines I have, but how the hell do I know where it came from?

I've replaced all her RAM with brand new modules. I've tried different video and sound cards. I've screwed around with Microsoft's driver verifier. Nothing seems to make the BSOD go away.

And I can't reinstall in this case. I have specific instructions not to. And besides, I don't have an appropriate XP MCE install disc (I have MCE, but not one that will take a Dell OEM key).

The only headway I've made is that it'll also BSOD with the same error if I open Disk Management. The drive (a 250GB Maxtor SATA drive) tests fine in self test and in Spinrite and I've replaced the cable already.

The BSOD happens in either Normal mode or Safe mode.

Any suggestions?

 

[Chewy509]

Hi Merc,

Sonypvl3.sys is a component of the Sony DRM rootkit... The only way to get it, is if she own's a couple Sony CD's which have the DRM modules.

I take it you've added "devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1" as one of the environment variables, gone into device manager, enabled "Show Hidden Devices" and had a look through the non-PnP section for this driver?

If not you should be able to remove it that way...

 

[Mercutio]

I completely forgot about that fucking thing.
Thanks Chewy!

 

[Handruin]

Is your beloved company the root cause of her troubles?

 

[Mercutio]

I do not know yet, but it's certainly possible.

 

[Mercutio]

No Sony rootkit. I've run several tools that promise to remove the Sony rootkit, and none of them detect it as being present.
Google, Google Groups and Microsoft's various support venues cannot tell me what sonypvl3.sys is, either.

 

[Bozo]

Can you boot from a Gento or DSL CD and rename the file?

Bozo :joker:

 

[Mercutio]

Renaming the file did not work - Windows seems to BSOD on boot without it.

Fortunately, one of the students in a class today brought an Inspiron notebook. It also had the file in question (is it a Dell thing?), but its copy was 693 bytes larger than the one on my cursed PC. I copied the different one and now it does not seem to be crashing.

I thought XP's file checker was supposed to keep file corruption like that from happening, but it does not seem to have worked in this case.

 

[LiamC]

Is this of interest/help?

http://forum.aumha.org/viewtopic.php?p=133312&sid=2b3b404b2c7e30f017d549c3725ea281

search for Sonypvl3.sys and read the post and links by Alan

 

[Chewy509]

No Sony rootkit. I've run several tools that promise to remove the Sony rootkit, and none of them detect it as being present.
Google, Google Groups and Microsoft's various support venues cannot tell me what sonypvl3.sys is, either.

Really??? Every PC that I've come across has that had the Sony Rootkit installed has that same file?

If it's something else pls let me know...

 

[Mercutio]

No Sony Rootkit. No evidence of Sony Rootkit.

I've removed it before, but not under a completely different set of symptoms, which is why I did not think of it as the problem.

But I really thought that was it.

I can't even tell where the stupid thing comes from. It's not Nero. The PC I was working on had Sonic for CD/DVD burning. It had Firewire ports, but they worked before and after I repaired.

My best guess is that some combination of the dozens of programs on that were on that machine corrupted that file. I really have no idea though. I just got it to stop crashing and under the circumstances that's all I could do.

 

[kevinfor2]

possible solution

I work as a PC Tech.. I've seen 5 PC's with this problem.. in each case the customer owned a sony video camera (differn't models some like DVD 505) When they installed software that came with the unit to transfer photos they would hit BSOD in sonypvL3.sys when they completely removed the software (and all registry keys, files in windows directory to ensure clean removal) the problem went away .. I don't own a sony .. so I'm not sure if a new driver etc is avail and Sony tech support are not the smartest people in the world.

someone mentioned sony rootkit... what evidence do you have that this file has anything to do with that? I searched multiple internet sites and found no relationship between the rootkit and this file.. I also ran multiple sony rootkit removal tools and nothing was related to this problem

if you download windbg tool from microsoft website and load the dump file into it (pointing to msft symbols public symbols server) you will get alot more info on what is actually causing the problem..

here's where the tool is..
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/debugging/default.mspx

watch this video from msft to learn how to troubleshoot blue screens
rather then spending hours searching the msft KB

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/default.mspx
click on mark's events on the left hand side and select windows hangs & crash dumps.. and follow directions..

thanks
kevin