When Bill Gates was demonstrating about the features of Windows ’98 before it was released in the market, his Operating System crashed in front of the entire audience. Later, when one of the managers in the Microsoft was demonstrating about the user-friendliness of Windows Media Center to play video games, the operating system crashed and displayed a blue screen error.
The Basics
The operating system is stored on the hard drive of your computer. The operating system acts as an interface between the computer and the user. When you power on the system, your OS usually gets loaded from the hard drive to the memory and helps the computer understand user’s commands to provide desired output. This process is called Boot and it is an essential operation that needs to be carried out for proper functioning of your computer.
Whenever the boot process fails, your operating system fails to get loaded and you get an error message that prevents you from accessing your computer. The boot process might fail due to the problem with the hard drive or operating system. Also, boot failures need not always be a serious problem. They can sometimes be so simple and can be rectified when the PC is restarted.
Remedies to Operating System Crash
- Trivial Issues: When the OS does not boot, first try to eliminate the simple failures. Try booting to safe mode and perform a system restore. You could also try booting to the last known good configuration. Sometimes, operating system does not boot when you install an external hardware or software that is incompatible with your Operation System. By uninstalling it, you would be able to boot to Windows.
- At times, when your PC cannot detect a keyboard or any important component, it would not boot to Windows. By analysing the error message, you could isolate the defective part and take appropriate action.
- Repair Installation: When the above steps do not resolve the issue, try performing a repair installation. Since your OS on the hard drive does not boot, you would try to boot your PC using the OS disk and perform a repair installation from Windows or DOS. This process would compare the copy of the OS on your hard drive with the copy present on the OS disc and rewrite the portions of the OS on the hard drive that has gone corrupt.
- Once the repair process finds the corrupt file on the hard drive, it rewrites the file from the OS disk and the process stops. Hence, if there are multiple corruptions, you might be required to perform repair installation multiple number of times to eliminate all the problems.
- Parallel Installation: If repair does not resolve the issue, then you might be having a serious problem. You stand a risk of losing important data stored on the hard drive. So, you need to try backing up your important data. Since your OS is corrupt, try to install a new copy of OS on the existing one without formatting your hard drive. Now, using this newly installed copy of OS you can access all the files that have been stored on the hard drive. Back up the necessary data and then format the hard drive and perform a clean installation, since parallel installation is highly unstable and could crash easily.
- Professional Assistance: If none of the above steps works and you have important information stored on your hard drive, you can still recover it with the help of data recovery experts. There are various online companies that sell data recovery software using which you could recover the lost data (not all data is recoverable). Alternatively, you could also get assistance from the data recovery experts in these companies who would back up the data for you, once you ship out the hard drive to them.