Blue Screen of Death!

[Royston]

I was halfway through typing up my assignment last night (these things tend to happen when there's a deadline), and my pc blue screened on me.

 

I rebooted, and before it finished scanning the drives, it blue screened again...this continued to happen. So I opened it up, resat the memory et.c, checked everything was properly connected, and gave it a clean. Started it up, and managed to get into windows (XP), however a few corrupt files were found when the drives were scanned.

Most of my applications on my desktop are now not accessible via the shortcuts. What happened, is the first programme that wasn't recognised (being my wi fi card) when I got back into windows, now overrides the majority of shortcuts on my desktop. The targets for the shortcuts appear to be fine, i.e they have the correct paths to the programmes under program files, but the icons can't be changed i.e they have the icon for my wi fi card...and open up my wi fi card app.

So for the time being (just so I can finish my assignment) I've linked what I need under the start menu, so I can access the apps I need.

Can anyone recommend a good download to sort this problem, I had a look online, do I just need a registry cleaner (if so, which one would be most suitable?) Or, does anyone know if there's a simple solution that I can do myself. I ran anti-virus (AVG), and it didn't come up with anything. Any ideas?

Note: I was up to the wee hours last night, trying to stick to my deadline, so if I'm missing someting obvious here, blame the lack of sleep.

Edited February 4, 2009 by Snail

[DrDNA]

Are you completely up to date with the latest service pack patches?

 

I've had the blue screen of death on numerous occasions, but the system always recovered after reboot, going into safe mode, then restarting normally.

 

Plus two or three complete hard drive failures, but not in association with the screen of death (at least no association that I was aware of).

 

I don't want to harp on the obvious, but you have imaged your hard drive and backed everything up on an external (eg, USB) hard drive, correct?

[Dudde]

I've been remoting into servers at work trying to make software connect to ext. HDDs or other various backup media and had the server blue screen once the device is initialized. You may look (if you have the windows cD) at running a repair install (most OEM computers will have the repair option as part of their partition utilities accessible before the OS hits) - most of the time it was just a corrupt or deleted file somewhere way down in the middle of no-where

 

you may also run a checkdisk on the volume, but I second the question before trying anything further, you have everything saved or backed up right?

[PrinceOfDragons]

When you got the bluescreen do you remeber what it said?

 

Im looking for the STOP: 0x000000??

[Royston]

Thanks all for the responses.

 

Unfortunately I have no idea where my OS disk is, but I tried practically everything already mentioned. Check disk found the corrupt files, and after running it again, it said everything's ok, which was to be expected. I tried rebooting from safe mode, but still the same problem. The blue screen appeared for a split second, before my pc shut down...so I wondered if it may be a power supply issue at first, or some other hardware issue.

 

All the data (that's important) is there, and all the apps work, but first port of call (which I really should of performed before I flew into a panic, and started fiddling around) is back my data up onto an external harddrive. So, I'm lucky that everything's accounted for.

 

I've only had blue screen once before, and it was just a case of downloading a file, and replacing it. I just wasn't sure if there was a dedicated file under system32, that dealt with shortcuts, that would remedy the problem.

 

The assignment is finished, so that gives me time at the weekend to back everything up, and figure out the cause.

[Dudde]

on the same line as PoD was asking, do we have any stop errors? I know blue screens most of the time say "here okay bye" and turn off, but see if you can snap a picture or write it down or something - it could be very helpful!

 

by the way, congratulations on completing the paper. Usually when I get computer problems during homework, I forget my homework

Edited February 5, 2009 by Dudde
congrats were in order

[Mr Skeptic]

If you get yourself a Linux live CD (eg Ubuntu or Knoppix), it should let you boot up your computer, and copy stuff from the hard drive. You could even email the file somewhere if you have nothing to back them on to, and I think there are even some online storage sites that let you store a few GB for free. I always keep a Linux Live CD for troubleshooting purposes. Ubuntu will even ship you one completely for free, but it will take weeks to arrive.

 

That should let you boot your computer and do stuff, so long as there is no hardware problems. If you have an extra computer and don't mind seeing computer guts, you can take the hard drive from the broken computer, and plug it into the extra computer (leaving its hard drive in place). This should let you recover the data even if your computer has busted hardware, unless your hard drive is busted.

 

Incidentally, when you reinstall windows, you may want to partition your hard drive, and install onto one partition but keep your stuff in a separate partition (this is slightly more complicated than it should be). Then if Windows goes borky on you, you can reinstall without losing anything from the other partition.

[Royston]

by the way, congratulations on completing the paper.

 

Thanks

 

If you get yourself a Linux live CD (eg Ubuntu or Knoppix), it should let you boot up your computer, and copy stuff from the hard drive. You could even email the file somewhere if you have nothing to back them on to, and I think there are even some online storage sites that let you store a few GB for free. I always keep a Linux Live CD for troubleshooting purposes. Ubuntu will even ship you one completely for free, but it will take weeks to arrive.

 

Thanks, I'll bear that in mind (the Linux advice), plus I'm sure Gmail could more than cope with a lot of data to my E-mail address. The important stuff i.e music (especially what I've produced) is already backed up on other devices, just the wavs, the cubase files aren't important, which is kinda irrelevant ATM.

 

I was actually going to (well a friend was going to set it up) split one of the hard drives into two partitions for back up, but I decided against it at the time, due to lack of storage...my pc is old, quite literally every MB counts on my hard drives.

 

This whole episode has prompted a new pc purchase i.e I'm going to buy another rackmount dedicated to math applications, games et.c, and strip down my current one to just the OS, cubase and a sound editing suite, so it should run very quick indeed.

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Merged post follows:

Consecutive posts merged

Problem resolved. A friend came over, and merged a file in my registry via a fix.

[Klaynos]

Using a single disk with two partitions whilst providing some protection against lost data, will REALLY depress you when the drive dies and you loose it all anyway. I use an external drive and a program called rsync (which is a linux app there's similar windows ones I believe) to run backups.

 

As for what happened, the original cause is most probably some weird hardware fault if you didn't find a virus, then windows hiccuping :s