- 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 