Get details about the Blue Screen of Death

Tips, Windows 1 Minute

In the comments on a post from early last year, How to troubleshoot the Blue Screen of Death, Al expresses a common frustration:

My PC has crashed a couple of times now to a BSOD with a stop error I can’t read quick enough. I see nothing in event viwer, is there any other log of what happened? What the stop error was and what the 4nvd.dll (possibly!) or whatever it was that flashed past is?

Information about a stop error (aka BSOD) should appear in Event Viewer’s System log. If you can’t find it there, try reconfiguring your system to stop after a stop error (what a concept!) so you can read the error on the screen. Here are the step-by-step instructions:

  1. Open the System option in Control Panel.
  2. On the Advanced tab, under the Startup and Recovery heading, click the Settings button.
  3. In the Startup and Recovery dialog box, under the System Failure heading, clear the Automatically Restart check box.
  4. Click OK to close the Startup and Recovery dialog box, and then click OK to close the System Properties dialog box.

After making this change, you’ll find that the details of a (hopefully rare) BSOD will remain on screen for you to study and write down. You’ll need to press a key to clear the screen and restart the computer.

Published by Ed Bott

Tech journalist. Author of 25+ books. ZDNET Contributing Editor since 2006. Contact info: https://edbott.com/contact-me/

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2 thoughts on “Get details about the Blue Screen of Death”

  1. It should also normally leave behind a memory dump file – for Windows XP this is normally stored in C:\WINDOWS\MiniDump and is named Minimmddyy-nn.dmp, where mmddyy is the date (month, day, year) and nn a sequence number (first dump that day is 01, then 02, etc). You can troubleshoot at leisure using the Windows Debugging Tools (http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/DevTools/Debugging/default.mspx). Load up WinDbg, select File/Open Crash Dump and the debugger will automatically list the stop code (called BugCheck code in the debugger) and normally the driver that probably caused the problem.

    In this case it was probably nv4disp.dll, which is the nVidia display driver. The display drivers are probably the cause of about 50% of all system crashes. ATI are little better than nVidia.

  2. Mike,

    Thanks for this tip. Unfortunately I am not a programmer and am not able to get any results. I did manage to successfully set the path for the websymbols, but when I try to analyze a dump file I get:
    Unable to load image ndasbus.sys, Win32 error 2
    *** WARNING: Unable to verify timestamp for ndasbus.sys
    *** ERROR: Module load completed but symbols could not be loaded for ndasbus.sys
    Probably caused by : ndasbus.sys( ndasbus+2a2a)

    Can you offer any advice on how to correct this?

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