Dealing With Blue Screens of Death

Steps for Preventing BSoDs and Minimizing Damage (And Avoiding Nervous Breakdown)

Before I go on with handling Blue Screens, I would like to say a few words on how to prevent them. It is much wiser to prevent (when possible) than to handle a disaster.

Do Not Pull the Devil by the Tail
Having frequent Blue Screens is hardly a kind of entertainment and dealing with their consequences is not fun, either. But there are many things that one can do to minimize the risk of having them and the damage they can do. There are simple steps that are very helpful:

• Get the appropriate drivers for the operating system you were running. And check for driver updates – although this might prove a double-edged sward because I can recall cases when the older version of a driver was working better than the latest one (not only in terms of stability).

• Generally it is better to make copies of the driver disks that come with your hardware but if you have already lost them and the vendor site does not offer suitable drivers for download, be very wary when solving the driver problem with a generic driver — in many cases it works perfectly but this is especially risky for causing Blue Screens.

• If you can’t find drivers that are working, consider changing the hardware or the operating system. If you have just bought an expensive card you will hardly want to throw it, so maybe you should sacrifice the operating system (especially if it is Windows 2003 — there might never be a driver for it).

• If you can’t find a driver but you don’t want to part with a beloved piece of hardware, you could install 2 versions of Windows on your computer — the one that you currently use and the one that the hardware works with – and boot whichever is needed. This is a clumsy workaround but sometimes it might work — a friend of mine keeps Windows 2000 because this was the last operating system that has a driver for one of the recorders and this recorder is beloved because it manages to read almost any disk that the other devices can’t even open.

• If you know that BSoDs are caused by some of the programs you are running (and the program is for the version of Windows you are using), try to replace these programs with something else. Or check for an update. I remember that I simply did not believe that a browser (FireFox) could really cause a Blue Screen, until I saw it with my own eyes once or twice. This was more than a year ago and I have never experienced it again but I just quote it as an example of an innocent program that might pull the devil by the tail.

• In the previous sections I recommended downgrading to XP or waiting for Vista (or Longhorn), if you have constant driver problems with Windows 2003. Well, It can be very exciting to be a beta-tester but when you want to have a reliable computer, jumping into the muddy waters of a new version can be too much of excitement. My experience with the Windows XP when it first came out shows that it is better to wait for the release of a service pack than to become a beta-tester. A colleague of mine, on whose computer an early build of XP has been installed, experienced Blue Screens several times a day and it’s needless to say that after some time she was happy to downgrade to 2000.

When Reinstalling Is Faster than Repairing
Unless the Blue Screen appears during installation, it might turn out that reinstalling Windows is faster than repairing. There are some cases when as a result of Blue Screens system files in Windows have been deleted and you can either try to repair them or directly reinstall. It is obvious but it is important to note that reinstalling will not help in case of faulty hardware or lack of appropriate driver (unless the driver is included in the Windows installation). Reinstalling will help only if you have tried some of the other means of troubleshooting — e.g. Safe Mode, Last Known Good Configuration and they were not successful. But if Blue Screens start, have in mind that you might need to reinstall, so be prepared. The following list certainly does not exhaust the topic of being prepared for reinstalling Windows, but for the purposes of this article, will do:

• Make regular backups of all valuable data — this way if you do lose information, you will not lose everything

• It is recommended to have a separate system and data partitions — you will appreciate the convenience of such a separation if you have to reinstall Windows, cannot get to your only partition to rescue your data and your most recent backup is an year old.

• If you have made an image of the system partition, this will save you the time and trouble to reinstall everything — you just need to recover the system from the image and install some additional programs, if they were not included in the image.

Handling Blue Screens
The first mandatory step in handling Blue Screens is identifying the reason for them. Looking at the Technical Information section of the Blue Screen could be enough but sometimes additional steps are necessary to reach the core of the problem. And if you do not know the reason for the Blue Screens, any measures you take are simply shots in the dark. There are more advanced approaches to diagnosing the reason than merely reading the text in the blue screen. For instance, memory dumps and error records in the system logs provide useful information when searching for clues, but correctly reading them requires more advanced skills than the general user has.

First, it is important when blue screens appear — after a hardware change or driver update, after you have just reinstalled your computer or even during installation, or they just appear out of nowhere? Each of these cases has a different troubleshooting scenario. Here are some clues for common cases. For instance, for driver changes try to boot in Safe Mode or use the Last Known Good Configuration. In case of physical hardware fault, you might need to replace the unit with a good one, or try the supposedly faulty unit on another computer. You could also run various tests — for instance if you suspect that memory blocks cause BSoDs, there are diagnostic tools to check if RAM is OK or not. For conflicting programs, check which ones are problematic and remove (or at least do not run) one or all of them. If system files are missing or damaged, you could run reinstall with Repair option and hope that this will solve the problem. Besides repair, there are many ways to prevent Blue Screens, so you’ve got choice!

Try Safe Mode or Last Known Good Configuration
One of the first life-belts to resort to when Blue Screens appear, is to boot into Safe Mode. Safe Mode is one of the multiple advanced choices that you have at startup. To boot into Safe Mode, restart your computer, wait the memory test to pass and press F8 to open the Advanced Options menu. Select ” Safe Mode” and press Enter. Go on with booting and when your Windows finally loads, you might not recognize it because Safe Mode is actually a mode with minimal set of drivers and programs. But it is more important that Safe Mode allows access to drivers and Windows configuration, so if you manage to boot in Safe Mode, you can uninstall a crashy driver or application, make some other changes (for instance configure that the system is not restarted after a BSoD and that memory dump files are written), or even rescue your data, if you have no recent backup.

If Safe Mode does not help, there is something else you can try — Last Known Good Configuration. As the name implies, Windows will load the most recent settings that worked. This is useful for immediate reaction after new hardware, software or applications have been installed. Last Known Good Configuration is another option in the Advanced Options menu at startup, so you already know where to look for it. If you have successfully booted in Safe Mode, you can go to Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> System Restore and choose a restore point (it might be not the most recent good configuration but another one prior to it).

Reading Memory Dump Files
Reading memory dump files is generally for more advanced users or developers who need to understand what exactly went wrong. There are three levels of verboseness for memory dumps — small, kernel and complete. To configure that a memory dump file is written, the location where it is written and the level of verboseness, you need to go Control Panel, choose System, and then click the Advanced tab. Then select Startup and Recovery and click Settings. This will display the following dialog box, from where you can also disable automatic system restart after a stop error.

Select the location of the memory dump file and whether an existing file will be overwritten. If you enable Complete Memory Dump and keep all dump files, you will have the files for all stop errors but you will need plenty of space on the hard disk, so check this in advance.

After you have the memory dump files, you need to get a kernel debugger like Kernel Debugger (Kd.exe) or WinDbg Debugger (WinDbg.exe) as well as symbol files (all these can be downloaded from the site of Microsoft) for the particular version of Windows you are using. And if you are really determined to have a look at a memory dump file from the inside, I suggest that you first read a lot about the debugging tools — you can start from here.

And finally, if you already miss Blue Screens or, on the contrary, you experience them frequently but you are still in the mood for jokes, here is a link you’ll appreciate — a very popular screensaver, which goes to extremes in mimicing a real Blue Screen. For instance, it shows information, which is obtained from the system itself, like the Windows build number, loaded drivers and addresses, etc. and I think it is an incredibly cute joke (although system administrators panic at first, before they see that it is not a real BSoD). Enjoy — in this case the imitation is better than the original!