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The Blue Screen of Death

f you have witnessed the "blue screen of death" (
BSOD) then you are aware of how scary it can be.
All the pictures and documents on your computer
facing extinction. How horrible a thought. And
you meant to make that back up but just never
found the time. Well there may be hope for that
drive yet so don't format it and reinstall, which
is the common way of correcting this problem. If
this tip works it may not work for long so be
prepared in advance to make backups of your files
that are important. Better yet buy a new hard
drive of equal or larger size and clone your
system to the new hard drive. The program that I
use exclusively for this procedure is Casper XP
and is sold by Future Systems Solutions. It is
an easy to use program. Before you can clone
your hard drive(Please do not think that I am
supporting Piracy) you still need to remove the
BSOD. This is accomplished by starting your
computer from the Windows CD for your computer.
Once it arrives at the installation screen select
repair using recovery console. This will open a
DOS session for you to perform a few commands to
try to repair your system. the first command is (
chkdsk /r )without the ( ) this will locate any
bad sectors and attempt to recover any data.
This procedure takes quite a while. After this
is done then type in (chkdsk /p) again without
the ( ) this verifies the disk against the volume.
The third step is to type in (fixmbr) without
the ( ) this will fix the master boot record on
the hard drive. Now type in the command EXIT and
your computer will restart. If all went
according to plan then your computer should boot
up normally. If it did not start up then there
are further problems and you should take your
hard drive to a professional so that they can
save the information that you need. They have
special forensic tools to extract data from bad
hard drives. If it started correctly then hooray!
Now is the time to install the Casper XP.
After installing the software shutdown your
computer open the case and disconnect the cables
from the cdrom drive and connect them to your new
hard drive. I do this as a short cut from
changing jumper settings on the hard drive.
Restart your computer and it should find the new
hard drive. After the computer is fully up and
running open Casper XP and select the copy drive
function. Leave all the settings at default and
Casper XP will copy all the information from your
old hard drive to the new hard drive. Once the
procedure is complete then shut down your
computer again and disconnect the new hard drive
and replace the cables to the CDROM drive. Then
remove the old hard drive from the computer and
replace it with the new hard drive. Restart your
computer and it should start normally.
About the Author
Computer Repair Technician
23+ years experience
www.ccsav.com