Sorry if this question may sound repetitive:

I am reinstalling softice in a system at work.

I need it to tweak some old drivers, legit stuff.


I know for a fact that Sice worked before in this system, I installed and uninstalled it sometime ago (to tweak similar drivers)

but now the computer refuses to boot when Sice is installed.
If I deactivate the Sice drivers, using the option that Sice gives you at boot time, it boots perfectly. If I put Sice on a VM it works fine, but I have no access to the drivers I want to trace. (They are related to a specialized hardware card, so no way to move it and the drivers to the VM).

Now, I suspect that some recently installed software/driver/windows update is conflicting with Sice. the question is how do I figure out which one?

How does the computer refuse to boot? Does it just freeze or BSOD? Did you try enabling the boot logging? Maybe you can get some more info from that log. If not, the log will at least contain the list of drivers that are being loaded. You can try the trial and error approach on that one. If all that stuff doesn't help... I'll think about how to tackle that problem further

if you can plug in a (bootfloppy/bootcd) and can edit boot.ini try inserting /sos switch next to /fastdetect that way you dont need a fully booted window to read the bootlog logs

/sos will spit what drivers are being loaded in text mode while it is booting

i found sptd and vm addons drivers playing hookey with my vm that way

got daemon tools or alcohol installed?

There now, isn't it a little too early to accuse naides of being drunk or possessed by the devil just because he's having some problems with his SoftIce?

The system in question IS at my work place so yes!
Satan is involved, He is an executive in the company, and I am required by contract to have at least a 0.90 level of alcohol when I show up to my working post. By the way, we are hiring, any body interested?

More seriously, I took the path of least resistance.

I learn very quickly which Driver was crashing (hanging) the system. nticE.sys (duh!) but I did not go through the painful elimination process of stopping one driver at a time to find the culprit.
I placed a fresh HD and installed a fresh Win2k OS, the software for the equipment and softice. Nothing more that could interfere with Sice, a real version of a virtual machine. I'm doing my debugging right now on the user interface of this fucking, outdated, but irreplaceable piece of software.

Thank you all, for your suggestions and help.
As usual you guys are the most qualified IT support anyone can ever dream to have!