Windows Died!

[mattbiernat]

My windows just died few minutes ago after a Windows Update. To be more precise the computer would not boot up and instead show BSD every time I turned it on.
Did anyone had that ever happen to them?

[ashleys]

Take a note of all the messages associated with the BSOD and then post the details here.

Without any error codes it's pure guesswork what the problem is.

[pipspeak]

Yes, it happened to me yesterday right after I ran an allegedly clean but probably corrupted exe file (hence all my posts about restoring).

The exe file ran but did not do what it was supposed to do. So i ran it again and same thing. So I tried to kill its process but it wouldn't die. So I shut down Windows and restarted, only to get the BSOD that flashed up so fast I couldn't read it. Windows went into a perpetual startup loop, restarting itself every time the BSOD flashed up. So I tried starting in safe mode. Same thing... perpetual startup loop that threatened to melt the HDD.

I figured I had a corrupted registry or boot.ini file and managed to repair the boot file using the recovery console with a WinXP boot CD, then started Windows in safe mode. Got all my important files off onto a second HDD and did a full system restore. PITA.