Debugging a driver under SoftIce

[xobor]

via symbol loader make sym file for your driver, set all paths to your sources and add sym file for your driver to files loaded after sice starts then use as first line in your code some function eg kddebugprint and set breakpoint

regards

I finally got it to work but it's weird. For some unknown reasons, since I installed DriverStudio, when I start my driver I get a page fault before even entering DriverEntry. I guess that while testing i did something wrong with the registry settings telling windows about my driver or somethign like this.

Anyway as I found this out (blame me I should have tried before to load the driver when softice wasn't loaded and see that there was a problem),
I tried it on a older windows installation I had on vmware and it worked without any problem whatsoever... (using exactly the same steps I described at the top of this thread)

I guess I should try to understand what went wrong with my windows but I'm too lazy

Well anyway, thanks a lot to all of you for helping me !

Regards,

What you have done in your first message sounds correct to me. You may have missed somthing simple in the line of doing that but principally that is the only way to debug a KMD. It is possible, as you have suggested, there is something wrong in the way your driver is being loaded so you actually never reach the entry point so you'd better put some trace messages in your driver and check the debug window (Hey, did you know that you can see the debug outputs of the KMDs in SoftIce too?) just to be sure that your driver is actually being loaded correctly and the entry point functions. Sometimes using the debug output is enough to debug many types of driver routines. For example, it is not a very good idea to debug an interrupt routing using SoftIce while debug messages can help a lot in that case.
JMI, while what you have written is perfect for normal applications, it does not help at all when you need to debug a Kernel Mode Driver. A driver has no process by itself and you can not ATTACH to it.

[xobor]

what was your previous windows installation on which your driver works ok ? Time ago i had to ported my own driver rfom NT4 to win2000 and i had the similar problem , in driver entry when I used some function it ended with pf
i had no time so i landed with windriver



regards