Troubleshooting Crashes

You often begin seeing blue screens after you install a new software product or piece of hardware. If you’ve just added a driver, rebooted, and gotten a blue screen early in system initialization, you can reset the machine, press the F8 key when instructed, and then select Last Known Good Configuration. Enabling last known good causes Windows to revert to a copy of the registry’s device driver registration key (HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services) from the last successful boot (before you installed the driver). From the perspective of last known good, a successful boot is one in which all services and drivers have finished loading and at least one logon has succeeded. (Last known good is further described in Chapter 13 ...

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