Games - Blue Screen of Death

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The Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) is the screen displayed by Microsoft's Windows operating system when it cannot or is in danger of being unable to recover from a system error. There are two Windows error screens that are both referred to as the blue screen of death, with one (Windows NT 4/2000/XP) being significantly more serious than the other (Windows 9x.).

The blue screen of death in one form or another has been present in all Windows operating systems since Windows version 3.1. It is related to the black screen of death in OS/2. In early builds of Windows Vista it was complemented with the red screen of death, used for boot loader errors.

Types of blue screens

Windows NT/2000/XP

In Windows NT, Windows 2000, and Windows XP, a blue screen of death occurs when the kernel or a driver running in kernel mode, encounters an error from which it cannot recover. This is usually caused by an illegal operation being performed. The only safe action the operating system can take in this situation is to restart the computer. As a result, data may be lost, as users are not given an opportunity to save data that has not yet been saved to the hard drive. Note that by default, 2000 and XP restarts immediately instead of displaying the error.

Blue screens are known as "Stop errors" in the Windows Resource Kit documentation. They are referred to as "bug checks" in the Windows Software development kit and Driver development kit documentation.

The text on the error screen contains the code of the error as well as its symbolic name (e.g. 0x0000001E, KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED) along with four error-dependent values in parentheses that are there to help software engineers with fixing the problem that occurred. Depending on the error code, it may display the address where the problem occurred, along with the driver which is loaded at that address. Under Windows NT and 2000, the second and third sections of the screen contain information on all loaded drivers and a stack dump, respectively. The driver information is in three columns; the first lists the base address of the driver, the second lists the driver's creation date (as a Unix timestamp), and the third lists the name of the driver .

By default, Windows will create a memory dump file when a blue screen error occurs. Depending on the OS version, there may be several formats this can be saved in, ranging from a 64 KB "minidump" to a "complete dump" which is effectively a copy of the entire contents of physical RAM. The resulting memory dump file may be debugged later, using a kernel debugger. A debugger is necessary to obtain a stack trace, and may be required to ascertain the true cause of the problem; as the information onscreen is limited and thus possibly misleading, it may hide the true source of the error.

Microsoft Windows can also be configured to send live debugging information to a kernel debugger running on a separate computer. (Windows XP also allows for kernel debugging from the machine that is running the OS.) If a blue screen error is encountered while a live kernel debugger is attached to the system, Windows will halt execution and cause the debugger to "break in", rather than displaying the BSoD. The debugger can then be used to examine the contents of memory and determine the source of the problem.

The Windows debugger is available as a free download from Microsoft.

Windows includes a feature that can be used to manually cause a blue screen. To enable it, the user must add a value to the Windows registry. After that, a BSoD will appear when the user presses the SCROLL LOCK key twice while holding the right CTRL key. This feature is primarily useful for obtaining a memory dump of the computer while it is in a given state. As such, it is generally used to aid in troubleshooting system hangs.

A BSoD can also be caused by a critical boot loader error, where the operating system is unable to access the boot partition due to incorrect storage drivers or similar problems. The error code in this situation is STOP 0x0000007B (INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE). In such cases, there is no memory dump saved. Since the system is unable to boot in this situation, correction of the problem may require booting with the Microsoft Windows CD. After booting to the CD, it may be possible to correct the problem by performing a repair install or by using the Recovery Console (with CHKDSK).

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