- What Is a Blue Screen Error?
- Troubleshooting Common Blue Screen Error Messages
- 0x000000ED and 0x0000007B
- 0x0000007E and 0x0000008E
- Using the Windows Debugger
This article describes what Blue Screen errors are, why they occur, how to recognize them, and how to resolve some of the more common error messages.
This article is specific to Microsoft Windows 7.
Click below to change the operating system.
Resolving stop (blue screen) errors in Windows 7 (Microsoft Content)
When Windows encounters certain situations, it halts and the resulting diagnostic information is displayed in white text on a blue screen. The appearance of these errors is where the term "Blue Screen" or "Blue Screen of Death" has come from.
Blue Screen errors occur when:
- Windows detects an error it cannot recover from without losing data
- Windows detects that critical OS data has become corrupted
- Windows detects that hardware has failed in a non-recoverable fashion
- The exact text displayed has changed over the years from a dense wall of information in Windows NT 4.0 to the comparatively sparse message employed by modern versions of Windows.
These two errors have similar causes and the same troubleshooting steps apply to both of them. These stop codes always occur during the startup process. When you encounter one of these stop codes, the following has happened:
- The system has completed the Power-On Self-Test (POST).
- The system has loaded NTLDR and transferred control of the startup process to NTOSKRNL (the kernel).
- NTOSKRNL is confused. Either it cannot find the rest of itself, or it cannot read the file system at the location it believes it is stored.
When troubleshooting this error, your task is to find out why the Windows kernel is confused and fix the cause of the confusion.
Things to check
- The SATA controller configuration in the system BIOS If the SATA controller gets toggled from ATA to AHCI mode (or vice versa), then Windows will not be able to talk to the SATA controller because the different modes require different drivers. Try toggling the SATA controller mode in the BIOS.
- RAID settings You may receive this error if you've been experimenting with the RAID controller settings. Try changing the RAID settings back to Autodetect (usually accurate).
- Improperly or poorly seated cabling Try reseating the data cables that connect the drive and its controller at both ends.
- Hard drive failure Run the built-in diagnostics on the hard drive. Remember: Code 7 signifies correctable data corruption, not disk failure.
- File system corruption Launch the recovery console from the Windows installation disc and run chkdsk /f /r.
- Improperly configured BOOT.INI (Windows Vista). If you have inadvertently erased or tinkered with the boot.ini file, you may receive stop code 0x7B during the startup process. Launch the recovery console from the Windows installation disc and run BOOTCFG /REBUILD
This stop code indicates the NTFS file system driver encountered a situation it could not handle, and is almost always caused by 3 things:
- Data corruption on the disk
- Data corruption in memory
- The system completely running out of memory (this typically only happens on heavily-loaded servers)
Things to check
- Reseat the memory and all drive data cables to eliminate data corruption issues stemming from poorly or improperly seated hardware.
- Run a complete memory and hard drive diagnostic. The quick test will not be thorough enough here. You need to run the full system diagnostic.
- If those diagnostics pass, run a full file system check from the Recovery Console (chkdsk /f /r) to detect and (potentially) fix any corrupted data.
- If none of the above solves the issue, reinstall Windows.
- If that does not fix the issue, replace the hard drive.
These two errors indicate that a program running in the kernel encountered an unexpected condition it could not recover from. They have identical troubleshooting and resolution steps, and you will probably need to use the Windows Debugger to find out what caused the error.
Things to check
- If the Blue Sc