Dealing With Blue Screens of Death

If blue is your favorite color, maybe there is a guaranteed way to start hating it — by seeing it five times a day, accompanied by really charming messages that gently inform you that any unsaved information might be lossed or that there was a hardware failure and so on. Can you guess what I am talking about? Blue Screens of Death, of course. The effects of Blue Screens can vary from causing slight irritation for the user, to real disaster for the data on the computer, to having to rushing the computer shop for buying new hardware, etc. I was joking about the negative feelings towards the blue color because of frequent Blue Screensm but if you really want (or have reasons — for instance if you are color blind), you can open the system.ini file and change the Screen of Death to be in a different color. More information about what to do after you open the system.ini can be found here.

Anyway, colors of Screens of Death vary across devices and operating systems — from yellow (Mozilla XML parsing errors), to green (TiVo devices), to black (OS/2 and Windows), so it’s up to you to decide if you’ll keep it blue or change it. And as rumor goes, in Windows Vista there will be a red Screen of Death, too — for really serious stop errors. Nice color — a reminder for the one that has been used for centuries in corrida. Let’s just hope that users do not react like bulls.

Some humor (or sarcasm) certainly helps but now let’s get serious about the topic and start exploring why Blue Screens appear and what to do when you frequently see them.

Why Blue Screens Appear
Technically, Blue Screens appear to prevent the system from a more serious error and damage. They are displayed when the system detects an error or problem, from which it cannot recover. The system stops (that is why the official name of Blue Screens is “Stop Error” ), writes the contents of memory on disk (memory dumps), if this is enabled for the system and displays a text-mode error message with information about the condition that caused the error. Blue Screens can appear at any time — during installation, at startup, or randomly without any apparent reason. Some of the most common reasons for BSoDs are:

• drivers

• hardware or hardware overheating

• conflicts between programs

• file inconsistencies or registry errors

It is not normal for Blue Screens to happen often. In fact, Blue Screens are not supposed to be a “feature” of Windows. So if you see them often and you are still able to boot Windows, you’d better pay them attention before they force you to do it and above all — try to figure out what causes them. If you have recently made hardware changes, this is one possible reason for Blue Screens. Physical failures in all kinds of hardware — memory, disks, cards, etc. — can be a reason for blue screens.

The latest versions of Windows, like XP and 2003 are more stable and can recover after a couple of Blue Screens but sometimes even a single Blue Screen can make your Windows unbootable and you will have to reinstall your operating system. Generally, the information in a Blue Screen helps identify the possible reasons and sometimes even the exact reason (if you see a driver listed in the Blue Screen text message then you can be almost certain that this driver is the suspect) but there are also many cases when the text messages of the Blue Screens are so vague that it’s not possible to guess what went wrong. Have a look at the troubleshooting sections of this article for suggestions how to deal with Blue Screens.

What Is Common in BSoDs on Windows 2000, XP, and 2003?
Although there are some specifics in the occurrence, appearance, and dealing with Blue Screens on Windows 2000, XP, and 2003, there are many common things that are valid for all of them. For instance, one of the things they all have in common is the information they provide. The exact text of the messages differs but generally there is technical information, which includes data like the stop error number, some additional parameters in hex format, the name of the module (if applicable) that caused the error, and the memory address where the error occurred, as shown in the first screenshot below.

Very often the symbolic name of the stop error is shown near the stop error number. Symbolic names are pretty cryptic and some of the most common ones sound like ” PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA” , ” BAD_POOL_CALLER” , or ” IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL” but sure there are a bit easier to understand than a stop message in hex format.

Another common section for all Windows versions is the recommendations section. It gives general advice about how to proceed. Sometimes the listed suggestions for recovery are exactly what is necessary to do in order to avoid new Blue Screens (for instance, if you have recently changed hardware or have updated drivers, disabling or removing them can be the solution). A general tip is to restart in Safe Mode. This also frequently helps, unless your Operating System is so messed up that it is not possible to start it at all and there is only one remedy left — to reinstall it.

The last section lists data about the debug port and dump status. If neither of them is enabled, you will not see this. When memory dump file saves are enabled, the progress of writing it (in percentage) is displayed.

Besides the sections in a typical Blue Screen, many of the stop messages are the same (or similar in meaning and troubleshooting, though the words might vary a little) for Windows 2000, XP, and 2003. I am certainly not going to list messages here, especially having in mind that one stop error message number actually can mean several different things, when the hex parameters in brackets are different. The best place to look for explanation of the stop error message code is the site of Microsoft — as they say, get information from the horse’s mouth.

What is Different in BSoDs on Windows 2000, XP, and 2003?
Well, the first obvious difference is the “design” . Its artistic advantages are outside the scope of this article but if you are interested in seeing several varieties of BSoDs, check here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_screen_of_death. There are examples of BSoDs for all Windows flavors but 2003, including oldies like Windows 3.x, NT, and 9.x when BSoDs were certainly more frequent than in 2000, XP, or 2003.

Another difference is the stop messages that are specific for only one version of Windows (or for a given version of Windows (e.g. XP) and a particular Service Pack (e.g. XP with SP2)). Therefore, when you encounter a stop message, have in mind to check its meaning and suggested troubleshooting for the version of Windows you are running. At the end of each support page for a particular stop error, Microsoft states for which versions of Windows it applies, so you will always know at least this. One place you can get a list of error messages and explanation from is the site of Microsoft. For Windows 2000 — check here; for Windows XP — look here, and here are the stop messages for Windows 2003.

Delving into the technical details of what is changed in a particular version or service pack of Windows is hardly the stuff that the general user, or even system administrator needs to know. For instance, SP2 for XP introduces changes in memory management and the kernel of Windows 2003 was considerably modified in comparison to previous versions. As a result, applications that were running on Windows XP before the SP2 has been applied or before you upgraded to Windows 2003 might either not start at all, or hang (with or without a Blue Screen). Even if you know that the reason is kernel incompatibility, unless you are the developer who wrote the problematic program, you can hardly modify it to fix it, so you must look for alternatives. The wisest thing you can do is find an updated version (if any), which is tested under the version of Windows you need it for — XP with SP2 or 2003. Or you can choose to remove the problematic program from this machine — for instance SP2 for XP includes a firewall, which is known to have had conflicts with some other firewall software (and not only). Some of the other firewalls are pretty jealous to load first and I personally had a similar case with two other firewalls and Blue Screens on a Windows 2003 machine. The problem was solved only after one of the firewalls was removed.

A very common reason for Blue Screens are drivers. Maybe they are even more common than physical hardware failure. Changes in memory management or the kernel affect drivers more than applications. Third-party vendors generally do not manage to deliver a new driver the moment a new version of Windows or a new Service Pack is released, even when they are making the efforts to do it. And in some cases they just never deliver a driver for a particular version of the operating system!

It seems that hardware vendors largely skip Windows 2003 — even manufacturers of high-end hardware components say that Windows 2003 is not for the general public, so why bother delivering a separate driver for that? And probably from a sales point of view they are right. I could not find precise and up-to-date data about the percentage of installations each of the three operating systems (Windows 2000, XP, and 2003) has but a relatively recent article states that “XP May Catch Up to Win 2000 By Year’s End”, which makes me think that even if XP has already dethroned 2000 as the most widely installed operating system, Windows 2003 is hardly in the game at all and my guess is that it makes hardly 10 percent of so from the overall number of Windows installations.

Anyway, Windows 2003 is a server operating system and is not supposed to be running on kitchen PCs, so it’s not a surprise that hardware vendors are not interested in it very much. The low market penetration of Windows 2003, together with its architectural changes from XP, explain why hardware vendors generally skip Windows 2003 in their driver assortment. And having in mind that Vista is over the horizon, it is not difficult to predict that there will not be many new drivers for Windows 2003 in the coming months. So, if you are running 2003 and have frequent Blue Screens because a driver (even if it is written specifically for Windows 2003) of a device misbehaves, you’d better consider downgrading to XP until Vista (or Longhorn) officially arrives. I’ll be talking more about (the downsides of) this in the next section.