Day 288 - BSOD

blue screen of birth

I spent half of today trying to fix one of the oddest PC problems I've come across in 20 years of building and fixing PC's. 

Failed...ho hum...

But I did make some progress.  A few days ago, it just suddenly refused to boot up, giving the old Blue Screen of Death.

blue screen of death

The error message itself is of the something went wrong type...some unknown error occurred.

Windows didn't even know what was wrong with itself... 

All self-repair attempts failed...

Replacing various bit of hardware, and unplugging everything not absolutely necessary failed to reveal any faulty parts... 

Swapping out RAM sticks, as it was increasingly looking like a hardware issue fixed nothing - it's not a memory issue...

Yet it will boot in safe mode...does that add more weight to the hardware fault theory, or to the software error theory?   It's not clear!

I was about settled on the hardware fault theory, and was going to suggest replacing the motherboard, but at the last minute decided to run a test.  I installed a new hard drive, newly formatted, removed the existing one, and installed a fresh copy of windows.

Works perfectly...

So, it's not a hardware issue (unless it's the hard drive itself, which seems unlikely).

It's a software issue, probably driver related, or some odd corruption deep in windows somewhere...but as all diagnostics show no errors, it's going to be pretty much impossible to identify and correct the error.

So I need to reinstall windows, preferably on a new drive...but then I have to work out what needs transferring/reinstalling from the old drive...it's going to be a bit messy, but it'll save buying a new PC, at least...

(By the way Andy, I found a spare 500GB SATA drive if that's any good to you?  Let me know...)

Ah well, back to work tomorrow, where I don't do any of that techy PC stuff any more...actually I've never done a huge amount in a work capacity, although I've always had strongly technical elements to my role...but now I'm 100% management, 0% technical. 

Not sure where that ratio's going at the moment, to be honest...

Finally, the astute amongst you may have noticed that I sneakily squeezed a climbing rope, a guitar, and an electric drum kit into the top photo...

At least the photo's not 100% technical!

;-)