What causes BSODs?

• drivers with bugs
• corrupted driver
• incorrectly installed hardware
• bad hardware

each of these will cause a different type of BSOD.

In my case, they were Sonic DLA drivers (tfsnifs.sys conflicted with a microsoft update, and this filename appeared in the BSOD). Sonic cd burner drivers that never go away. I think they come with the OS or something, I don't know. but I was told not to remove them or your OS will not boot. but I found I could simply rename this file and all would be fine and my machine would boot.

STEP 1. write down your bluescreen on paper

first, write down all your blue screen information on a piece of paper. there is probably a driver file listed. you may need to rename this file (rename instead of delete, in case you need to bring it back - shorten the extension by 1 character on the right side, like from .sys to .sy, .exe to .ex, .dll to .dl) you can do research on the stop message you are getting and see what is causing it and try to fix the problem.

some BSODs go away after a reboot. some don't.

STEP 2: try a reboot

STEP 3: further steps if reboot fails

incorrectly installed hardware

• is the card seated correctly? (it's not angled or anything or partially out of socket)?
• did you screw the metal backplate down?

bad hardware

only thing you can do here is to replace the hardware. If it's a CPU or motherboard that's going bad, you might want to take a look at the following pages:

repair OS if you have to replace the motherboard.

sound, LAN, USB, and chipset/motherboard drivers, and possibly video drivers are on your motherboard drivers cd. you can also find that on the motherboard manufacturer's web site.

If you installed a 3rd party PCI/PCIe/whatever adapter, you probably have the disc for them, or you can find them on the product manufacturer's web site.

getting a bad driver out of the way

before you boot gparted, make sure you have:

1. successfully repaired your filesystem, let it do all its rebooting.
2. successfully shut down.
3. booted into CMOS SETUP though delete key, F1, F2, F12, F10, or whatever key your computer happens to be (before windows comes up - gotta be fast), and set it to boot cdrom as the first priority device, with usb next and hard drive next. you can also do usb first and cdrom next, provided you don't have a bootable USB device inserted. save and exit.
4. press a key to boot from cd while you can if it asks.

using either the system rescue cd or the gparted livecd, you can boot to a shell prompt (not the GUI), and mount your disks as type ntfs-3g, rename the offending driver with the mv command, and then dismount the disk, then init 6 to shut the system down. you press enter a nunch of times mostly except at the point where you select a GUI or text mode prompt. choose text mode prompt with gparted, since we don't want to go into the partition manager.

these are linux "live" cd's - they don't install the OS onto your computer, but they are a self-contained OS with utilities on a CD.

ls /dev/sd*
(look for devices with numbers on the end and mount 
those - you will need to make a directory for each
it will probably be /dev/sda1)
OR
ls /dev/[sh]d[a-z][0-9]+
for an exact list (should work)

mkdir /mnt/c /mnt/d /mnt/e
mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /mnt/c
mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda2 /mnt/d (optional)
mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda3 /mnt/e (optional)

(here is where you rename the bad file with mv
I usually change 
.dll to .dl
.exe to .ex
.ocx to .oc
.sys to .sy
for example
mv tfsnifs.sys tfsnifs.sy
the root directory is really /mnt/c)

cd /mnt/c/windows/system32 (if your problem is tfsnifs.sys)
ls -l tfsnifs.sys
mv tfsnifs.sys tfsnifs.sy

umount /mnt/c
umount /mnt/d
umount /mnt/e
init 6

...corrupted drivers, buggy drivers

See is there are updated drivers you can use. perhaps your drivers got corrupted. this can happen if you powered off the computer without shutting it down properly. If you did that, it would be a good idea to perform a chkdsk /f on the drives affected, (probably C: if that is your system drive). do [windows-logo-flag-key]-R chkdsk c: /f Enter. If it asks you if you want to fix the filesystem on reboot, tell it y Enter and then restart the computer. a shutdown will also work.

using vi, a *nix editor (alternative: emacs)

the lifecd at the bottom is not gparted, but it will also work, because it also has ntfs-3g, and the steps are the same. I suggest you use vi to edit your file. if you have never used the editor vi, it's a mode based editor: vi somefile edits the file or creates it.

make sense? people who work with unix either love vi and can't stand emacs or love emacs and can't stand vi usually.

there's a linux command like unixtodos or utod which converts UNIX line endings to DOS line endings. that step will need to be performed after editing via linux and vi. you can get help using

unixtodos --help
or
utod --help

it might be in /usr/bin/unixtodos or /usr/sbin/unixtodos or /usr/local/bin/unixtodos but it's probably not in the PATH, so it won't execute without specifying the full path from a hash prompt.

GPT-MBR partition conversion (should you need to)

Linux rescue and gparted Live CD's