The Windows Blue Screen of Death (BSOD):
Ah— the dreaded Blue screen of Death. When your windows operating system crashes, you will get the dreaded Blue Screen of Death, which is a stop error. Only, in this case, it means that your operating system has totally crashed.
Most people don’t realize that the Blue Screen of Death is actually a protective mechanism that the operating system uses to prevent irreparable damage to the system files by immediately shutting down the entire system the instant it discovers a critical system error. If it shuts down fast enough, damage will be avoided. If not, you could end up having to reinstall your operating system depending on what caused the error. The picture below shows a BSOD error.
What Causes the BSOD Error?
The primary causes for BSOD errors are:
- Poorly written device drivers. In this case you should update your drivers.
- Malfunctioning hardware such as bad memory, power supplies, overheating, etc
- Two applications attempting to write to the same memory location simultaneously because a record lock failed
- Invalid / corrupt registry entries. You can repair this with a good registry cleaner.
When the encounters a fatal error, it will send diagnostic information to the display screen right before it reboots the system. In many cases, the reboot will clear the problem and the system will run normally.
What Does All That Stuff on the Screen Mean?
Each stop error is paired with a description of theerror and an eight digit hexadecimal error code number. You can use thisinformation tofigure out what is ciausing the problem. Let’s dissect the error screen above. A copy is shown below.
In the first red box, it says that the spcmdcon.sys file has cause a PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA. That is the type of error the system encountered. This error occurs when the data requested from memory by the processor cannot be found at the location address provided. This can be caused by defective RAM including main memory, video RAM, L2 or L3 cache, etc.
The second red box contains the technical information about exactly what memory locations are involved.
Can You Fix a BSOD Error?
In the case above, there is a good chance that one of the memory modules has some bad blocks. Even if the machine reboots and runs fine, you should get the memory tested and replace it if necessary or at least use a repair utility that can mark the block that are bad so the system doesn’t use them again.
If there is nothing wrong with the hardware and the problem keeps reoccurring, you will need to do an operating system repair using the repair console or you can just reinstall the operating system.
Some Common BSOD Errors are:
IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL – a kernel mode process tried to access restricted memory, which means memory reserved for processes that have a higher IRQL level than it does.
KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED – an illegal or unknown processor instruction was encountered
PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA – the requested data could not be found at the supplied address
INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE – the system cannot access the boot sector which usually means there is a hard drive disk problem or a boot sector virus.
UNEXPECTED_KERNEL_MODE_TRAP – caused by defective or mismatched memory, a bad CPU or a bad CPU fan and the processor is overheating
DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE – caused by a defective device driver
THREAD_STUCK_IN_DEVICE_DRIVER – a bad driver is causing an infinite loop
NTFS_FILE_SYSTEM – the file system is not working properly
UNKNOWN_HARD_ERROR – one of the registry hives could not be loaded into memory usually because of a hard disk failure or a corrupted registry hive
STATUS_IMAGE_CHECKSUM_MISMATCH – usually caused by a damaged paging file but can occur for other reasons
Conclusion
The BSOD, especially if it reoccurs, usually means there is a serious problem that will eventually require you to replace hardware or to reinstall the operating system. In fact, many times it may be necessary to do both … replace the faulty hardware and then reinstall the operating system.
