Pete's Log: Pete vs the Blue Screen o' Death (STOP 0x0000007E edition)
Entry #1697, (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)(posted when I was 31 years old.)
When I visited my Uncle Piet back in May, he had me take a look at his laptop that was BSoDing at boot. It would BSoD even in safe mode, and he didn't have a Windows CD anymore, so there wasn't much I could do. I fiddled with the BIOS settings a bit, but that was about it.
Since his computer wasn't working anyway, he decided to just send it with me to try to fix when I have a chance. Well, the past few months have been a bit busy and since I didn't have a Windows rescue disk of my own, I kept putting it off. But now I've finally gotten around to it. I created a BartPE CD and got the laptop booted with that. First thing I did was copy all his documents to a USB drive so he could at least get those back.
The first problem to address was that the laptop was automatically rebooting itself as soon as it encountered the BSoD, so I had no chance to read the full error message. To disable the automatic restart, the registry key AutoReboot under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\CrashControl needs to be set to 0. I was able to manipulate the registry on the hard disk while booted from my BartPE CD. Instructions on how to do so can be found here.
Now I was able to see the error code:
STOP: 0x0000007E (0x80000003,0x80532952,0xF88A01C0,0xF889FEBC)
I googled this error and found a bunch of different causes for it, but none of the symptoms seemed to match mine. So I tried a few things. I ran chkdsk, but it found no errors.
I tried (temporarily) removing recent driver files by moving them out of c:\windows\system32\drivers, but that also had no effect.
So I tried to enable boot logging by adding /bootlog to boot.ini. But no boot log was being created after restarting and getting the BSoD again. So for fun I tried safe mode again. This was the first time I tried safe mode after disabling the automatic restart, and this is the first time I realized that the error displayed in the Blue Screen was different here. I now get a PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA and the code
STOP: 0x00000050 (0xAC1AB5CB,0x00000001,0x80532950,0x00000000)
Googling the combination of the two error codes (7E and 50) leads me after a while to this page, which suggests that the windows patch KB977165 is at fault.
So I check, and sure enough I find a $NtUninstallKB977165$ directory. Even more interesting is that the date of this directory is February 11, and February 11 is the last date any files on the hard disk where touched (except for ones I modified today). Fascinating.
So I run the commands in $NtUninstallKB977165$\spuninst\spuninst.txt to uninstall the patch, and sure enough, the laptop now boots again.
Pete 1 - BSOD 0