BSOD, now can't boot

I upgraded my Mum's Win 8.1 PC to Windows 10 and she reported she started having BSOD, which she'd never had before.

Having read reports of old drivers causing problems, I guess this might be her problem so I told her to unplug her USB soundcard, which is the only add on component I think. That didn't solve it, so I pointed her to this page http://www.thewindowsclub.com/kernel...ailure-windows and told her to try step 3, running Driver Verifier Manager, which says to select the "unsigned drivers" option but for some reason she decided to select the "all drivers installed" option!

After rebooting she got another BSOD and now the PC doesn't boot at all apparently. I haven't actually witnessed any of this myself but I'm planning to go over there tomorrow to try and fix it, so any suggestions for things to try would be very helpful. If it comes to it I'll try a clean install of Windows 10 but I hope that won't be necessary. She doesn't have much software installed, Thunderbird, Chrome and a few other things like a Family Tree maker, so it won't take too long to reinstall that but there's all the configuration of Windows that takes the time.

Just a quick update. She says she "completed all options in Driver Verifier and they all checked OK" and she also did the Memory Diagnostic Tool which was OK too.

Apparently she managed to get it to boot as she says it "seems stable in Safe Mode" but that "running a check" (not sure what that means) produced 'Service Registration corrupted" which it automatically fixed.

Well having had a chance to look at it myself I found it wouldn't boot normally and the BSOD said something like "Driver verifier violation". So I booted in Safe Mode and in Driver Verifier selected "Delete Existing Settings" as it was obviously still running with the "all drivers installed" option that was last selected and this was stopping it booting.

I also disabled the drivers for the onboard ViA audio, as that doesn't work properly anyway, hence why I bought the USB soundcard, and the onboard IDE which isn't being used (the only drive in the machine is the SATA SSD) and the ViA USB PCI card, which also isn't needed. Then, whilst I was deleting the Windows.old folder, the PC locked up with some strange streaks of colour on part of the desktop.

I then removed the ViA USB PCI card, rebooted and uninstalled the drivers for it and uninstalled AMD Catalyst completely (it still leaves the 8.970.100.9001 driver for the onboard HD4200), updated the Comodo Firewall and rebooted. I then found the AMD External Events Utility service was still installed, so set that to Disabled along with Windows Firewall.

If it still crashes I might have to do a fresh install, unless someone has any other suggestions.

Hi axe0

No worries, I've been rather busy myself.

My Mum said it was "fine" yesterday, that it only BSOD once but it was OK after she rebooted! That's not really "fine" though, so I'll grab the zip when I get a chance.

Sorry it's been a while, I haven't been able to get to my parent's until today and they didn't report any problems until I got here, when they told me the PC is "completely dead" now!

It seems that somehow the BIOS settings got corrupted. I think the battery is fine as the time and date are still correct but the CPU fan speed monitoring had been enabled, which was causing a POST error as the fan that's installed doesn't report it's RPM. Also the onboard graphics was set to use "Above 4G" when there's only 4GB of RAM installed, so after POSTing it was getting stuck in a loop and never getting as far as booting.

Anyway, after sorting the BIOS settings out, when Windows tried to boot it ended with a BSOD "Inaccessible Boot Device". I ran the repair, which was unable to fix anything and then booted in Safe Mode and rebooted in Normal Mode OK after that, at which point I tried to create the logs but it doesn't create a ZIP file on the desktop, even if I run the program as Admin, so I'm a bit stuck.

OK, I found the problem.

The Desktop folder which contains the icons on the Desktop and which is reached via Explorer->Desktop and Explorer->This PC->Desktop is at D:\Data\Desktop, whereas the Log Collector is creating its files in C:\Users\x\Desktop.

I've attached the zip file now.

I wasn't aware she had any such stuff on her system but I've had a look and removed anything I could find which might have been dodgy.