Deadly Experiences (BSoD, RSoD, GSoD, etc.)

[techno_race]

I wanted to hear about your experiences with deadly error messages.
These include: Blue Screens of Death, Rings of Death, Black Screens of Death, Sad Macs, Sad iPods, Yellow Screens of Death, Rows of Bombs, Bombs, Guru Meditations, White Screens of Death, Red Screens of Death, ESoDs and kernel panic.

My experiences heve been only with BSoDs.
Apart from the experiences trying to load Windows 98 drivers into a Windows XP machine, the scariest (and most surprising one) was in my Windows 2000 laptop.

On Christmas 2006, I was copying font files to a 1GB USB thumb drive from my Win2K laptop. Having nothing important on there, therefore not worrying about data loss or corruption, I carelessly unplugged it from the laptop in the middle of the copy. This resulted in an error meassagebox "Please insert a disk into drive E:" or something like that. A few seconds later, I inserted the thumb drive into drive E: (or whatever was on the message; most likely E:). Inserting the disk didn't result in continuing copying, but resulted in a BSoD. Neither the thumb drive nor laptop's files or sectors were damaged or deleted.
Does anyone know what caused this?

P.S. What does ESoD stand for? (WSoD in some newer Verizon phones)

[djr33]

Error Screen of Death? :p

[Twey]

I once had a kernel panic with the x86_64 Linux Atheros drivers... they hated TCP, I could ping things fine (ping uses ICMP, for those who don't know), and send data out via TCP, but when I tried to receive data, everything died. I couldn't find the problem (part of that driver is closed-source, anyway, due to certain legal problems), and eventually I submitted a bug report and switched back to i686. They're better now, though.

I'm hoping to learn how to develop kernel modules when I have the time, though, so I daresay I'll be seeing a lot more of them soon :p

[techno_race]

Ouch.

[djr33]

Ironic story, related to this site--
I was playing with a multiboot setup on my machine, and started messing with DOS (well, through the command prompt).
I'll recommend-- DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME :p
...I did. Didn't work out too well.

I was doing various things with partitions, booting software/defaults/etc., and.. the command prompt.

To make a long story short, I wanted to see what "dynamic" meant for the options for a disk.
In diskpart (partition manager and such), "change" (I think... not looking at the moment) is the command to convert between "basic" and "dynamic" drives. Well, sounded fun. "Dynamic Drive"... like the site.
(At this point, I was fed up with the computer, and it needed to be reformatted anyway, so I wasn't too concerned with messing things up.)
I went through with the change on drive C. And... chaos.
It was so bad it didn't even make it to the blue screen of death. Just to right before the windows prompt, where it... died.
After hours of playing with an install disk and trying to use dos commands through that, I gave up, and started the reformatting process.

This is actually why I haven't been on here much for the last week or so. My PC is now unusable (til I deal with finishing reformatting, and I've been busy), and I'm replacing it anyway, with a new intel-based macbook, so I can run XP and OSX on it at the same time, which will be quite nice for both net stuff and video work. I should have that up and running soon, which will make it more convenient to do net stuff, such as programming related to DD.

What's amusing is how easy it would be, I think, to write a virus based on that. About 6 commands to an unusable computer. But, then again, I hope this doesn't get into the wrong hands. Heh.

[techno_race]

I have to admit, love your sig !

A better place to say that would be here (http://www.dynamicdrive.com/forums/showthread.php?p=85633#post85633).

[ItsMeOnly]

too many to list, but most destructive?
- No #1 will always be the death of my last PC: quiet, but permanent- it just froze, having nice BOINC manager on screen. The machine booted exactly one month after, with completely new guts (is 75% more powerful than before).
- No #2: cache corruption of my Alphastation, system would work for 2 days, then die.
- No #3: the Institute of Journalism server's PCI bridge corruption, it still works, but headless (in 58th day of uptime now, for some wicked reason it NEVER got to 200th day: either it was 7-hour power outage, a superstorm or 105 deg. F heat- the absolute record was exactly 191 days)...
- No #4: My Indy always freezes when Mozilla finishes loading page- go figure...
- No #5: memorable IRIX crash ("Kernel Panic") when playing with software synthesizer and setting modulation source to modulation target ("long long" would always be too little for the result)...

[techno_race]

Yikes.

[pcbrainbuster]

Just wondering here but can you lot please tell me what the following are EXACTLY -

Virus
Trojan
Trojan Horse
Malware
(if there are more than add please and thank you)

I know in one way what they are but need to know more specificly the difference...

[techno_race]

Virus - something bad? (I haven't figured it out yet)
Trojan & Trojan Horse are the same thing. It's a program that does what it says it does AND dumps harmful things into your computer. An example is WeatherBug.
Spyware - Things like keyloggers that harm your computer and tend to harm you as well with thinks like stealing credit card numbers, passwords, etc. like GuardBar, etc.
Adware - Software that pops up ads. A perfect example is WhenU SaveNow!.
Malware - A very broad term for all of the above.
Hope this helps.

[pcbrainbuster]

Thanks nd it did help :)...

[djr33]

Adware - Software that pops up ads. A perfect example is WhenU SaveNow!.
Yes; however, here's the real story there:
spyware and adware are basically the same thing, with one exception--
spyware is spying on you, like a spy... hidden. adware is something that was added, with your knowledge, but does more than you believed, or you were actually unaware of what you were doing.
Spyware is illegal, but adware is legal, as you did in fact give it permission.
An alert that says-- "Click OK to recieve a special offer" might actually install adware, but some carefully worded message, or fine print below, etc. might alert you, subtly, to the presence of addtionally software that will do the same exact stuff as spyware, but just... with your permission.

A trojan horse, then, isn't really something different, but a description of any of these things that pretends to do one thing and actually carries inside it (hence the metaphor) something else. It is, then, in almost all cases, adware, as you do give the horse permission to enter, but not the virus (or whatever) inside.
It might also be something that hides itself as, for example, a cookie, so it's faking itself not to you, but to your system, to get by. This is similar, but different in the way it uses the disguise, so it might be a virus, etc., in this case.

A virus differs from these in that it is intentionally attacking you and has (usually) no pretense.

You get a virus from a malicious site, whereas spyware and adware (sometimes it's hard to tell between the two) can be obtained through normal use of the computer. AIM, for example, loves to install several other "features". DISABLE THEM!... they do strange stuff, and spybot doesn't like 'em. But, in installing the host program (AIM) and allowing for them to be installed too, you get that.
This is a major downside to Kazaa (or at least used to be... not sure on the situation now), as it came with a ton of required add-ons.

In fact, a strategy used by many companies to make money is bundling adware with their product and requiring it for the use of it. If you delete the adware, the game or program stops working as well.

[Twey]

Technical definitions:

Virus: any program that copies itself.
Trojan horse (sometimes abbreviated to "trojan"): a program that does something other than what it advertises itself to do.
Malware: Software that does something bad.

[djr33]

I think this should be renamed to "Have you seen a ghost-- for computer nerds!" :D

[techno_race]

http://www.acornshop.co.uk/site_content/site_acornshop/resources/vista_logo.jpg + http://www.xs4all.nl/~ernstmul/images/msnbonus/hand01.gif = http://www.techhelpers.net/e4u/comp/comp03.gif?

You're probably wondering about the BSoD formula posted above. Well, approximately 51 minutes ago...

I was clicking on a link like usual and Windows Vista crashed. A BSoD popped up saying "PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA." http://www.emoticons4u.com/sad/533.gif I assumed it was my BSoD screensaver and stared at it for a moment. 2 seconds later I got this message:


No signal
Going to sleep

That scared me a little. ö¿ö Since I thought it was the screensaver, I didn't record the error codes. I looked up "PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA." I found that PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA's error was 0x000050.
This is the first time a BSoD has hit my Windows Vista machine. (In all the 5 month's I've had it. :-P)
Two obvious reasons it wasn't the screensaver:

It didn't say BAD_POOL_HEADER like the screensaver does
and I was in a different user account which used the "Bubbles" screensaver.


I didn't know Vista BSoDs looked like 2000 BSoDs. :-Þ

The one funny thing about it was that it made this REALLY FUNNY error message when it finished rebooting:

Microsoft Windows
Windows has recovered from an unexpected shutdown.A problem caused Windows to stop working correctly.

Yeah, I knew that. :->

[mburt]

Lol... I love that image. This thread is amazing. :)

[Twey]

Since I thought it was the screensaver, I didn't record the error codes.Hahaha, so there is a disadvantage to running BSoD screensavers :p

[lainlives]

in windows xp there is a 'feature' ? that you can enable in the regestry that will allow you to hold R_CTRL and tapp scroll lock 2x and you get a blue screen that says
USER_INITIATED_CRASH

and all the kernel crap

[techno_race]

in windows xp there is a 'feature' ? that you can enable in the regestry that will allow you to hold R_CTRL and tapp scroll lock 2x and you get a blue screen that says
USER_INITIATED_CRASH

Yeah, I know. Windows 9x too.
This could make a fun joke.

[riptide]

well the worse thing was seeing my friends gamyboy crash.
no computer problems though.

you ever see a gameboy crash it's not one of those things you see alot.

I wish nintendo made an MP3 player. Their stuff hard to destroy

[boxxertrumps]

It takes 15 hits with a sledgehammer to kill a ps3.

If sony made body armour, fights would be more interesting.

[lainlives]

well the worse thing was seeing my friends gamyboy crash.
no computer problems though.

you ever see a gameboy crash it's not one of those things you see alot.

I wish nintendo made an MP3 player. Their stuff hard to destroy

an older model Creative Zen is hard to smash
i accently droped mine and hit it with the lawn mower and it was still working
plus it is easy to upgrade the HDD on some zens :D

[jscheuer1]

http://home.comcast.net/~ansiguy/images/arnett/compvirans.gif

[lainlives]

http://home.comcast.net/~ansiguy/images/arnett/compvirans.gif

DUDE THIS IS AWSOME!!

[techno_race]

Hehehe.

[mburt]

That, I must say is... CRAZY INSANE! Whew, glad I got that off my chest :p

[deficit]

I once tried to install Mac OSX Tiger 10.4.8 on my Athlon 64 3700+ machine, using AMD/ nVidia (for my nForce 4 chipset (SATA, PCIE, Ethernet, whole north and south bridges, actually)) 3rd-party-written kexts. I accidentally converted my entire drive's filesystem to Extended Journaled, instead of just the partition I wanted it on. Well, the installation went ok, but it wouldn't reboot! The BIOS wouldn't even recognize or initialize the drive anymore. I ended up having to plug the drive into my friend's Mac and reformat it from there using an OSX disc and OSX's drive utility... I couldn't even boot from the Windows XP or OSX discs on the PC.

All I can say is, if you have an AMD machine and especially an nForce chipset and/ or SATA hard drive, and you are considering trying to do an OSx86/ XP dual-boot, DON'T EVEN TRY IT! That is, unless you are fully prepared to not only lose everything on your hard drive, but also to render it completely unusable and impossible to even reformat from a PC. Not to mention, if you manage to get to this point and don't know anyone with a Mac you can plug your drive into to reformat it, you might as well just throw the drive right in the garbage.

It's actually really funny looking back on it, but you'd better believe I'll never be trying to do it again!

[techno_race]

A while ago, I got a message stating:

STOP {Fatal System Error}
The Windows Logon Process terminated unexpectedly.
The error codes were 0x0000000 and 0x0000000.
It kept coming back when the machine was restarted. It didn't even boot into safe mode!
That machine always did act a little strange, for example, for a few days it didn't even like Windows Media Player.
Happened right after a Windows update. Never did fix it.
I hope that won't happen again.
(Windows XP)


Same laptop.
"XMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED"
Hang on a moment. What is an XMODE_EXCEPTION, and what was NOT_HANDLED about it? :confused:
I would have told you what the error codes were if it had told me. All it said was:

XMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED
Beginning dump of physical memory: 0
Nothing more.
I stared at it a moment and unplugged it at the same time the memory dump reached 14.
All I tried to do was type three words in AbiWord!
Also, It kept trying to load all the startup programs twice.
WOW, that laptop is good at crashing.
I haven't plugged it back in since.
(Windows 2000)

[techno_race]

One BSoD screensaver has "SYSINTERNALS_GREAT_SITE."

A 4-year-old 2K machine...died.
1. Turns on normally.
2. A few minutes later, when it's restarted, it turns itself off at 99% loaded.
3. It keeps doing that.
4. A little later, it turned on completely, had the right light-blue color, but...no cursor.
5. SAFE MODE is chosen from the Advanced Startup Options menu.
6. Same as step 2.
7. LAST KNOWN GOOD CONFIGURATION is chosen from the Advanced Startup Options menu.
8. Profile 1 - the only profile - is selected from the menu.
9. It gets to 99% booted, and bluescreens something like "A driver has corrupted pool memory."
10. Same as 9, except with "KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED."
11. Same, with "<Fatal System Error> The Windows Logon Process terminated unexpectedly. State 0x0000005 (0x0000000, 0x0000000)." (Amusing, because wrapped like:
"terminated unexpectedl
y.")
12. Same as 9.
13. Same, with something I can't remember.
14. Same as 11, except with curly brackets instead of carets.
15. It starts normally again.
:confused:
No, it POSITIVELY wasn't a screensaver.
How is this even possible, having different BSoDs every time? :confused::confused:

[lainlives]

my most common bsod (in wyndoze) is when nero tries to read a cd in my f: drive it says

IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL
blah
blah
blah
begiining dump of physicle memory then it hangs up at 2 percent