Help Troubleshoot the Blue Screen of Death by Preventing Automatic Reboot
One of the most frustrating things about troubleshooting random blue screen errors is that the computer reboots before you have a chance to write down the error messages so you can google them later. I remember watching one of my friends trying to time it so he could snap a picture with his camera before it rebooted…
Instead of dealing with all that, we’ll just turn off the automatic reboot option and force the blue screen to stay there.
Update: This should work just fine on Windows 7, even though the screenshots are from Vista.
Right-click on the Computer icon and choose Properties. Windows 7 or Vista users will be taken to the system properties screen, so click on Advanced system settings.
The Advanced tab should already be selected, so you’ll want to click the Settings button under “Startup and Recovery”.
Here we go… just uncheck the option for Automatically restart under the System failure section.
Next time you get a BSOD you’ll be able to see it and able to write down the error message. You’ll have to manually reboot the computer if this happens, of course.
This article made me start thinking… are there any horror movies based on the blue screen of death?
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Hi. Nice blog by the way. Here’s a couple more ways to get even more details from a Windows system crash:
I should point out that the errors will show up in Windows Event Viewer and, of course, in the kernel memory dump or minidumps if you have WinDbg.
Start – run – eventvwr.msc to start the Windows Event Viewer. Vista has an interesting tool called the “Reliability Monitor” which monitors various crashes also. Start – run – perfmon.msc
Anyway, if you install Microsoft Windows Debugging Tools (WinDbg and the Debugging Symbols) you can perform very simple analysis on the memory dumps (it’s as simple as loading the memory dump in WinDbg and typing “!analyze -v” and maybe looking at the list of loaded drivers (lm kv), running the deadlock verifier (!deadlock), listing memory usage (!vm) and examine the current thread (!thread) and process list (!process 0 0).
I’ve done something a bit more advanced here using Windows Driver Verifier (helps pinpoint faulty drivers) and WinDbg:
http://unixsadm.blogspot.com/2.....nting.html
I’m simply pointing out that even regular home users can look at the output and get a general idea on what could be wrong with their system. As it turns out, most crashes are caused by bad hardware (a simple memtest86+, sensors and S.M.A.R.T. tests should point that out fairly quickly) and, of course, faulty drivers (usually solved by updating to the latest and greatest version available).
With the right tools and a bit of reading, it’s simple enough to fix most computer issues
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Ok, so i froze the blue screen and wrote down the error code…now how do i find and fix the error?