Monday, April 13, 2009

Why did my machine blue screen?

My machine blue screened this morning and restarted itself.  I went into safe mode and then restarted normally with no problems.
But I was concerned about why my computer blue screened.
Using WinDbg, which is part of the Debugging Tools for Windows package I was able to determine the cause:
ERROR_CODE: (NTSTATUS) 0xc0000218 - {Registry File Failure}  The registry cannot load the hive (file):  %hs  or its log or alternate.  It is corrupt, absent, or not writable.
ADDITIONAL_DEBUG_TEXT:  \SystemRoot\System32\Config\SOFTWARE - hive could not be loaded.
Here are the steps I followed:
  1. Installed debugging tools.
  2. Looked at my System Properties --> Startup and Recovery Settings --> small dump location
  3. From a command prompt:"c:\Program Files\Debugging Tools for Windows (x86)\windbg.exe" -y srv*c:\symbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols -z c:\windows\Minidump\Mini032709-01.dmp
  4. from the WinDbg prompt: !analyze -v
  5. Read the results.

3 comments:

dbam987 said...

It doesn't work for me. I get "Object reference not set. Get a working computer, one with an Alt-key. - Yours truly, Billy G."

dbam987 said...

I got a different error on the second run: "Upgrade to Windows 7."

Anonymous said...

It took me a long time to search on the net, only your site open up the fully details, bookmarked and thanks again.

- Kris