How to troubleshoot a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD)

Blue screens of death can be really difficult to deal with. Most of the time, the BSOD will show a file name, a line with very little information and some numbers that, most of the time, won't help you. Today i will show you how to analyze a minidump file which gives you a lot more information about the blue screen so that you can get on the bottom of it.

The first thing we need is to enable your computer to create minidump files during a BSOD. To do so Right click My Computer, select Properties, open Advanced System Settings, under Startup and Recovery click Settings. Place a checkbox at "Write an event to the system log" and under "Write debugging information" select "Small memory dump." Make sure the settings are the same as in this picture and restart your PC.

Now that your PC is making minidump files, you just need another BSOD to happen and you will have a file to analyze. For this step we need to download Microsoft Debugging Tools from this site.

After installing the software, go to Start - All Programs - Debugging Tools For Windows - Windbg to open it. Now you need to enter the symbols path so go to File - Symbol File Path and copy/paste the following line in the box:

SRV*c:\symbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols

Make sure that you enter everything, don't leave out the SRV at the beginning. Now go to File - Save Workspace so you don't have to enter the symbols path again if you want to use the software later.

Now it's time to import your first minidump file. Go to File - Open Crash Dump and locate a minidump file which is usually located in the %systemroot%/minidump directory. In most cases that's "C:/Windows/minidump." You might need to give a permission to open the file, if that's the case, just copy the file to your desktop which is often easier and faster.

Now you should see information slowly appearing on your screen and the first step is to look for something suspicious. For example, the software pointing to a driver or in my case, to a file:

There you can see that the error was caused by the file dump_wmimmc.sys which is part of a an anti-cheating software for the game Prius Online that i was testing. Without this software, i would have never found it out.

If you need more information about the BSOD, you can click on !analyze -v

So this is the way to find out a lot more information about a BSOD and i hope it will help you with dealing with the most famous error message.