Where are the error logs?

[George Marshall]

My Win 2K machine has gotten in the habit of deciding Windows Explorer
(and sometimes other apps) have hit an error, and will be re-started.
It also says an error log is being created, but doesn't supply its name.

Where is that error log? I have searched for log files, and have found
a few with a time stamp that matches the problem, but can't open them.
For example, winnt/system32/config/software.log (among others) seems
like a likely candidate, but is always greyed out, and attempts to read
or copy it fail because another application is using it.

Is there some sort of logfile viewer in Win2K I can use to look at these
unavailable, in-use, files? Any other suggestions on how to find out
why Windows Explorer is restarting itself?

Thanks,

George Marshall

 

[Guest]

Have you tryed the event viewer in computer management
(right click My computer

 

[Kevin McNiel [MSFT]]

Search your hard drive for either user.dmp or drwtsn32.log. They may be what
you're looking for.

Kevin McNiel, MCSE/MCSA
Platform Server Setup Group

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
Please reply to the Group only, This address cannot receive incoming
messages.

 

[George Marshall]

I did find the event viewer after I posted the message, thanks. It
reveals that I am getting a disk controller error every day or two on
one disk, and that I am getting a timeout on one of my SCSI disks
slightly less often.

Could these be the cause of Windows Explorer crashing?

 

[George Marshall]

I found both files; the .dmp is a binary I don't know how to interpret
(any suggestions?); the .log file does indeed confirm that Windows
Explorer has crashed many times this year. So, the question is, "why"?
Are there any tell-tales in that dump that would say why it crahes?

By the way, I did bring up both the Event Viewer per above message, and
the .log dump, and there is really no correlation between crashes in the
log, and entries in the Event log.