What is the blue screen of death?
This error is displayed by Microsoft Windows family of file systems and is caused via a variety factors.
After the system has displayed this error the system will ‘crash' or halt completely allowing no further execution of data, the screen will be completely blue, save for the white text with the actual error codes listed, hence the name ‘blue screen of death'.
In real time the error is classed as unrecoverable, this is because the software has no way of handling the stop error any further and so will halt the system completely, not until a reboot attempt has been made will you know if this is a long lasting or more serious error.
To analyse the failure a kernel dump file must be created and then examined later on an independent machine this will show where and how the stop error took place and point to the failure points.
Also classed as a stop error it can be caused by incorrect drivers, software and hardware in rare cases it may be a combination of all three conditions, perhaps you have replaced the graphic card downloaded the wrong driver however the graphic card is also faulty, this can be a common problem as the graphic card may have faulty RAM or is overheating.
If no changes have been made to your system that you are aware of and you have suffered from a blue screen of death then you will be rightly concerned about the data is stored on your hard drive, is it still intact, does the hard drive have an issue.
Surprisingly this is one area that regularly can cause the blue screen of death, if the hard drive has a bad sector(s) it may cause the fault condition to arise.
Another form of stop error is a boot loader issue this will typically display NTLDR is missing, this will be either a logical or physical issue with the hard drive, simply put the boot loader segment is corrupt and missing and the system will not be able to load the operating system.
Our engineers recover data from these errors and a regular basis, our advice to you is that if you have suffered from this type of error is to switch off and contact our data recovery team who will be pleased to assist you further for a recovery solution.
Please do not re-install your operating system as this could destroy your data, some recovery cd's offer a non destructive re-install however we have seen firsthand the damaged caused by this procedure, professional data recovery services is your only real option here.