Intel® SSDs: Extracting System Logs for Debug

Documentation

Troubleshooting

000055094

11/08/2022

In case of system crashing/screen of death/SSD IO timeouts and many other situations, obtaining system logs is imperative for further debug. This article describes how to extract system logs from Windows* and Linux* systems.

Extracting System Logs in Windows and Linux

Windows

  • In the system root folder, the "screen of death" info is present in a file similar to mem.dmp. It could also be in a folder with a name similar to memorydump. Obtain this file.

    AND / OR

  • Go to the Windows start menu and type Event Viewer to get the window shown below. Save all the events and obtain the .zip file.

    Event Viewer

Linux*

Kernel logs (such as VMkernel.log) is very helpful for debug in case of a crash, as well as a detailed log of steps that led to the crash - the more information, the better!

For system logs: $ Dmesg > dmesg.log
OS version: $ cat /etc/*-release
Kernel version: $ uname –a

However, dmesg is the kernel ring buffer and only shows messages from the current boot process.

If there has been a system crash or reboot, the logs are dumped in /var/log/messages.

There are several other logs in /var/logs that may be useful, depending on the Linux distribution.

These are a few useful ones:

/var/log/Xorg.0.log /var/log/Xorg.0.log.old~/.xsession-errors /var/log/messages

/var/log/Xorg.0.log /var/log/Xorg.0.log.old
~/.xsession-errors
/var/log/messages

Identify and provide the file with relevant information to the system crash or issue.

For just the last x number of lines in any Linux system, one can use the parameter in the end of less or more commands in Linux:
| tail -x (or) | last -x
This depends on the kernel version.