My PC Crashed Overnight – What Should I Do?
Asked by
CuriousCoder123
I woke up to find my PC refusing to start up properly after shutting it down last night around midnight. It started blue screening right after I turned it on, doing this several times before I was taken to the advanced startup repair. Unfortunately, when I tried to troubleshoot, including using the command prompt and safe mode, I kept hitting blue screens. I even attempted to reset and reinstall Windows, but that also ended with a blue screen right at the reinstallation. I'm really stumped since it was off for 12 hours; I'm not sure what caused this. Any suggestions?
Answers
First up, if you can get into Windows or safe mode, check for any crash dump files located in the C:WindowsMinidump folder. These files can give insights into your blue screen issues. If you find any dump files, zip them up and upload them to a file sharing site. You might want to consider changing your settings to create small memory dumps moving forward, so you have extra files in case things go wrong again.
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It could just be a corrupt Windows installation, in which case a clean reinstallation from a USB should solve it. However, if that doesn't work, you might be looking at a hardware issue. Try the clean install first, and if it fails again, let us know.
UserBackupPlan: I tried this, and thankfully it worked! No crashes so far, but now I have to reinstall all my programs... Learned the hard way about keeping backups!
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HelpDeskHero: They mentioned that safe mode failed for them, so that path might not work.