The dreaded blue screen of death

If you want, you can email the dump file to me and I’ll tell you what’s wrong. Send me a pm here or on steam.

Edit: if you have 32 bit Windows, that is.

Stop right there.

Does it bother anyone that Microsoft makes it so damn hard to analyze their crash files? That you have to dig to find this driver info, instead of, I dunno, that stuff getting displayed on the bluescreen, or in a readily accessible place after the crash?

Yeah, it’s always bugged me. And it finally bugged some other people enough that they wrote this:

Why the frack Microsoft couldn’t bundle something like this into their OS after OVER A DECADE of bluescreens is beyond me.

Bonus - This one works almost everwhere.

* BlueScreenView works with Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista, and Windows 7, as long as Windows is configured to save minidump files during BSOD crashes.
* BlueScreenView can read the MiniDump files of both 32-bit and x64 systems.

Actually, it’s in the first post. He did a system restore and it did nothing. “Last Known Good Configuration” would do absolutely jack shit after a system restore.

Could not get on at all last night, this morning it took me 5 times of the computer trying to load up windows failing then restarting to get it up. I just took a look at the event log for today and the only ones now that are showing up are related to the CD rom drive.

The driver detected a controller error on \Device\CdRom0.

I still can run the computer in safe mode, when I put on Safe mode with networking it doesn’t work.

edit: One other thing today I’m not seeing the blue screen come up the screen just goes black and the computer restarts.

Does not sound good. If money is tight, I know quite a few people that would try to reformat and hope for the best.

Look, I think I’m doing pretty ok in this thread for a guy who can’t read.

If the computer is restarting and you aren’t getting a thermal error, there’s probably something wrong with the system board. Are you on a desktop or a laptop? If you’re on a desktop, open the case up (after disconnecting it from everything of course) and check out the board. Look for blown caps. They’re little round cylinders that should have flat tops. If they’re rounded, they’ve blown out. If they’re leaking shit, that is also bad.

You can also try pulling the memory if you’ve got some you can swap it with to see if one’s gone bad.

Good recommendation with the motherboard.

Oh well good god damn I sure as shit could have used that 2 years ago.

The restarting goes like this (on a desktop): I boot up the computer ,see the flash screen of my mobo, get to the black screen with windows , and then it reboots. Could that error log with the cd rom drive be having an effect? Also the fact that I can’t boot in safe mode with networking troubles me.

Other thing, why does it seem to work sometimes and other times it’s not? When I go home tonight I’m going to see if forces me into safe mode and see where the event log shows a problem. Now if it is for something like the Cd-Rom and I can’t find the disc for it , am I SOL in that area?

You should try booting up with only one stick of ram, and then swapping it out with another. That is an easy way to test and see if memory is your culprit. Windows is going to be more picky about ram then your bios posting.

Or (since nobody has suggested this yet), you could run memtest. It’s a boot option on most Linux install disks, or you can download a bootable memtest iso from http://www.memtest.org.

um, why aren’t there any suggestions for checking the event viewer and then googling the logged error code? What’s with the weird debugging shit?

Just boot normally so th ebluescreen occurs, check the time, restart in safe mode, check the event viewer and look for entries logged at the time of the BSOD. Check the error code in google and post here as well.

See the third post in the thread.

wat? I did read event viewer but figured it wasn’t explained properly to the OP.
Does Jab2565 even know what to look for? Doesn’t seem like it.

Jab2565, check the time the errors are logged in at.

I’ve checked the error logs for the time, and the only one that came up was for a display driver and sometimes for a CD rom, unfortunately my computer isn’t booting up at all right now so I’m posting from work. Tonight I’m going to try to get some more troubleshooting done and I have a friend who may take a look at it.

My L4D matches are unfortnately called off for the time being.

Looks like things may be fixed, friend came over noticed that I was using 182 drivers for my card and updated them. Rebooted twice with no problems, if I turn on the computer tomorrow and it doesn’t blow up I should be fine.

Update: Just booted up the computer and it loaded up except when I got to the black screen with windows XP the screen flashed green for a second then continued running normally. The event log still showed something going on with the CD Rom as well. Any thoughts?

Failure of cable connection DVDROM to motherboard, or that controller itself.

Typically you’ll have two controllers, each capable of two devices. Are your drives IDE or SATA? If you are using XP and with IDE drives, check your drives (typically in device manager IIRC) to make sure you are not running in PIO mode. XP kicks you down to PIO mode if it encounters errors, and never kicks back up automatically (?)

If controller, you could bypass problem by using the other controller.