# The frustration of the "blue screen of death"



## NRA_guy (Jun 9, 2015)

I spent about 12 hours and some money because my desktop (64-bit still running Win 7) came up with the blue screen of death Sunday.

It happened when I was trying to create another backup/clone of the C: drive.

I have all kinds of rescue discs, backups, clones, restore points, and system repair and disc drive checking software---none of which worked.

I bought and ran on a CD something called "Easy Recovery" which did not do anything that my Windows rescue disc and boot options were not already doing:

https://neosmart.net/EasyRE/

I even downloaded Ubuntu and put it on a DVD and booted (which gave me the ability to see that all my files were still on the hard drive).

Finally, I noticed an option during the boot options process (pressing F8 during booting) for "Boot using the last known good boot".

Wham-bam it worked and I'm back in business. It booted right up.

By the way, none of the solutions posted on the internet mentioned that solution.

And I won't remember it the next time it happens. 

But I now understand that rescue discs, backups, clones, restore points, system repair and disc drive checking software, and guidance posted on the internet are basically useless in such situations.


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## Cabin Fever (May 10, 2002)

You might want to take this opportunity to either buy a new computer or, at least, transfer all your files, favorites, saved passwords, photos, etc. to the cloud or to an external hard drive.


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## painterswife (Jun 7, 2004)

I have not experienced a blue screen of death since I upgraded all the computers to Windows 10. So that is several years now. I am very happy about that.


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## Nevada (Sep 9, 2004)

NRA_guy said:


> I spent about 12 hours and some money because my desktop (64-bit still running Win 7) came up with the blue screen of death Sunday.


Cabin Fever has a good point. The blue screen points to a fundamental problem that might best be fixed by purchasing a new system. But not everyone is in a position to do that.

You glossed over a lot of important information, like how you were going about the disk clone and what happened when you tried to reboot. Clearly, there's something seriously wrong for you to end up with a blue screen.

The blue screen always indicates a problem. What's going on with a blue screen is that the processor is handed an instruction to divide by zero, which it can't do. While blus screens can occur due to a programming error, more times than not it's the result of damaged data. Damage can result from a disk read/write error, bad or hot memory, and even an overheated processor. The most common culprits are a processor fan heat sink clogged with dust, a hard drive going bad. bad memory, or even a bad motherboard. I can't encourage you enough to check your system for fundamental problems.

How to check for problems? By far the most common culprit is a fan heat sink clogged with dust. You'll need to open your case (with laptops, remove the back cover) and visually check the fan heat sink. To check the hard drive, run a disk utility to check for bad sectors. If you have bad sectors your hard drive is probably going south on you. Unfortunately, the only way to check for memory or a bad motherboard is to replace them with known good equipment.

Some people will recommend staying away from Windows to avoid the blue screen. They might tell you that only Windows will revert to a blue screen, while Mac & Linux never will. So knowing that the blue screen is caused by dividing by zero, are they suggesting that Mac & Linux can divide by zero? No, Mac & Linux can't divide by zero any better than Windows can, they just call it something else -- a kernel panic. The system still halts and requires a reboot to recover.

Post back if it happens again and we'll try to identify the problem.


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## NRA_guy (Jun 9, 2015)

Several months ago, I upgraded my desktop to Windows 10. The upgrade did not bring over a number of my installed programs. Programs that I use frequently and don't have the installation discs for, or are no longer available for download. 

I reverted back to Windows 7 . . . but my missing programs were not there. Fortunately, I had made a clone of my C: drive before I upgraded to Windows 10; so I just swapped the clone back in and was back where I started.

Since then I have acquired and used a laptop with Windows 10. (I'm on it now.) I'm getting OK with Windows 10 and I can live with it if necessary.

So soon we will get Windows 12 or whatever.


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## NRA_guy (Jun 9, 2015)

Nevada said:


> Cabin Fever has a good point. The blue screen points to a fundamental problem that might best be fixed by purchasing a new system. But not everyone is in a position to do that.
> 
> You glossed over a lot of important information, like how you were going about the disk clone and what happened when you tried to reboot. Clearly, there's something seriously wrong for you to end up with a blue screen.
> 
> ...


Thanks. Yeah. I think I screwed up something in the Windows booting process. It happened right after I unplugged a 2-Tb USB-connected external hard drive that I was backing up my C: drive to. 

I unplugged the external drive because it seemed to have stalled. I won't do that again. 

Thanks again.


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## Nevada (Sep 9, 2004)

NRA_guy said:


> Several months ago, I upgraded my desktop to Windows 10. The upgrade did not bring over a number of my installed programs. Programs that I use frequently and don't have the installation discs for, or are no longer available for download.
> 
> I reverted back to Windows 7 . . . but my missing programs were not there. Fortunately, I had made a clone of my C: drive before I upgraded to Windows 10; so I just swapped the clone back in and was back where I started.
> 
> ...


Be careful using Windows 7 for Internet tasks. You're a sitting duck for malware, viruses, and hackers.


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## Nevada (Sep 9, 2004)

NRA_guy said:


> Thanks. Yeah. I think I screwed up something in the Windows booting process. It happened right after I unplugged a 2-Tb USB-connected external hard drive that I was backing up my C: drive to.
> 
> I unplugged the external drive because it seemed to have stalled. I won't do that again.
> 
> Thanks again.


That's what I do to clone a drive. I connect the new drive to a USB3 slot using a USB3-to-SATA cable, then use EaseUS Partition Master (free edition) to do the transfer. USB2 takes forever but USB3 only takes a few minutes, even when transferring several hundred gigabytes.

It's more important than it used to be to keep up with drive usage. The best way to avoid SSD failure is to stay below 50% usage. So when I approach 50% usage I buy a larger SSD and clone my old drive to the larger one.


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## HermitJohn (May 10, 2002)

Nevada said:


> Some people will recommend staying away from Windows to avoid the blue screen. They might tell you that only Windows will revert to a blue screen, while Mac & Linux never will. So knowing that the blue screen is caused by dividing by zero, are they suggesting that Mac & Linux can divide by zero? No, Mac & Linux can't divide by zero any better than Windows can, they just call it something else -- a kernel panic. The system still halts and requires a reboot to recover.


LOL, you certainly can hose a linux system. I recently did so by having package manager install some software that I hadnt used before. For "Daisy" format book reader if I remember. Sometimes its just easier to do reinstall than try to find the problem. Unfortunately I hadnt made a recent backup copy, otherwise since its frugal install of Puppy Linux, it would been trivial. So had to start from scratch with new save file. Puppy still booted fine if I didnt try to use the hosed save file.

Saying that, its always been lot easier to blue screen windows than to kernel panic linux. Back in win95/98, blue screen was monthly thing. I remember having to reinstall win98 about every three months. It was just easier and less time consuming to reinstall it than to try and hunt down the actual problem. The NT systems are more stable. But win10 goes into its fake repair routine if you make any changes. Doesnt even explain what its doing or wants to do, but if you want your system to load, you have to let it do its thing. At least win98 would give you some cryptic code for what was wrong.

Oh yea, its not hard to learn how to reinstall/repair windows bootloader. worthwhile skill if you use windows. Unfortunately cant brag about Linux bootloader either. GRUB2 can be painful.


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## NRA_guy (Jun 9, 2015)

Nevada said:


> That's what I do to clone a drive. I connect the new drive to a USB3 slot using a USB3-to-SATA cable, then use EaseUS Partition Master (free edition) to do the transfer. USB2 takes forever but USB3 only takes a few minutes, even when transferring several hundred gigabytes.
> 
> It's more important than it used to be to keep up with drive usage. The best way to avoid SSD failure is to stay below 50% usage. So when I approach 50% usage I buy a larger SSD and clone my old drive to the larger one.


I do the same thing regarding cloning. USB3 via a USB3.0 to SATA connector.

I used to use something called XxClone, but they stopped supporting it, and my copy now never stops running. It seems to start all over automatically as soon as it finishes.

I have EaseUS Partition Master, and have used it. I now use AOMEI Backupper and it seems to work fine. To me, AOMEI Backupper seems a bit easier to use.

I am running a 1 Tb old rotating style (not SSD) hard drive in my desk top PC and a couple of 2 Tb rotating drives for clones. None of them are anywhere near full.

Thanks.


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## NRA_guy (Jun 9, 2015)

Yeah, I ran the "Repair Windows Automatically" a bunch of times from several different bootable rescue CDs to no avail.

I also got to the C: prompt and ran "bootrec /fixmbr" and other recommended DOS command fixes several times. No fix.

I'm still not sure what my problem was. But choosing "Use the last known good boot" worked. Hallelujah!

The thing that most annoys me is the number of different configurations of Windows and PCs.

It's like every one is different and solutions for one do not work for another.

When you want to figure out something, you get, "Well, you might try the following . . . " Then 4 people say it fixed their problem and 10 say it didn't help, but some other solution did. And it goes on and on until the web site manager closes the discussion.

When I get to be King of the US, I will decree that all PCs be the same in every respect. Like when our only choice was "IBM XT".


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## HermitJohn (May 10, 2002)

NRA_guy said:


> When I get to be King of the US, I will decree that all PCs be the same in every respect. Like when our only choice was "IBM XT".


DOS for everyone!


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## NRA_guy (Jun 9, 2015)

HermitJohn said:


> DOS for everyone!


 You are preaching to the choir, man. I learned FORTran in college in the summer of 1966. We ran the Ole Miss main frame computer to do our homework. We could reserve the main frame computer for a block of 30 minutes at night. I would go over to the building around 1:30 a.m., turn on the lights, power up the computer, run some startup punched cards, then run my FORTran punched cards, get output in the form of punched cards, put them into a card reader/printer, and get my print out (mostly error messages).

When I moved to Mississippi State, they ran our punched cards on an IBM 360 main frame and handed us our printouts. A "do loop error" would generate a ton of paper.

When I graduated and went to work, I used a teletype machine, with punched tape input, time sharing at a local bank's main frame. The teletype transmitted data at the blinding speed of 110 baud.

So, yeah, I go way back. And I still use DOS ocasionally.


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## NRA_guy (Jun 9, 2015)

Back to my cloning situation. After using AOMEI to clone my hard drive, and check the clone, I note that a partition called "SYSTEM (H" is missing from the clone.

I had told AOMEI to clone the entire hard drive.

See below.

The red box is on my PC hard drive.

The green box is on my external (cloned) drive.

Is that a big deal if I need to later swap the clone into the PC?
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ETA: I tried the cloned drive and it works just fine. So I am not sure what the significance is of the clone missing the "SYSTEM (H" partition that the installed drive has. Apparently, it didn't affect the booting or operation of the PC in any way.


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## Nevada (Sep 9, 2004)

HermitJohn said:


> DOS for everyone!


While I got along with DOS pretty well, Windows was nearly as big of a breakthrough as the introduction of the PC itself, maybe even bigger. Before Windows computer users were pretty much limited to people who needed them for work, and hobbyists of course. The general public was never going to take the time to learn to navigate DOS. The introduction of Windows 3.1 in the late 1980s is what ignited the computer industry, since the point-and-click environment was intuitive enough to be easily picked-up by virtually everyone.

What surprised me the most about the PC industry igniting was the wide & varied uses for PCs. To some the PC was a word processor, to others it was for photo editing. Then there were accountants using it for spreadsheet analysis, and even dedicated accounting software. The PC became a valuable tool for generating sheet music for the various instruments in orchestras. Some people in my workplace used PCs as 'dumb terminals' to access the mainframe, since PCs were much less expensive than leasing an IBM 3278 terminal. Schools began using PCs as tutoring devices for virtually every subject. All of the uses for PCs made the scientific applications I was using seem quaint.


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## ScottOz (Mar 10, 2020)

We are still running DOS at work I think. No using mouse and all menu screens. Stone age program from S. Africa


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## HermitJohn (May 10, 2002)

Nevada said:


> While I got along with DOS pretty well, Windows was nearly as big of a breakthrough as the introduction of the PC itself, maybe even bigger. Before Windows computer users were pretty much limited to people who needed them for work, and hobbyists of course. The general public was never going to take the time to learn to navigate DOS. The introduction of Windows 3.1 in the late 1980s is what ignited the computer industry, since the point-and-click environment was intuitive enough to be easily picked-up by virtually everyone..


Actually there were several other gui overlays for DOS and other similar systems. Microsoft was just extremely ruthless in buying or otherwise killing them off. Look at one called GEOS. It was quite nice for the time. Lot like win3.1. A contemporary of win95 was BeOS, far superior to win95 IMHO. I used it for a while, was UNIX based. At the time it was superior to any windows or linux platform. Unfortunately MS was ruthless in its suppression, threatening computer manufacturers that wanted to offer it. They knew it could be a serious threat. BeOS sued AND WON, but Pyrrhic victory. They were bankrupt by the time wheels of justice had turned. Apple was interested in it at one point, but decided against it. Be operating system sold off to Palm and except for some small parts of it, died unused but not available for open source community. There is a open source version called Haiku, but it is from a very small group enthusiasts, has its own kernel, but leans heavily on linux to have enough drivers and software to be significant. Trying to play catch up with new operating system would be incredibly expensive anymore. It was hard enough back in DOS days. Even on phones, Android and iOS have pretty well cornered market. If you wanted to come up with new system to compete, you would somehow have to come up with similar library of software.


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