Windows XP’s Black Screen of Death and The Importance of Backups

I was dispatched to help set up a new PC for one of my customers and perform a data transfer from his old Windows XP PC. Got the new PC all setup, programs installed, got it on the network and then booted up the old PC…and waited…and waited…until it came up with what I refer to as the BLACK screen of death. You all have heard about the BLUE screen of death, the cryptic Windows error dump file that likes to flash on the screen and spiral downward into a sea of continuous reboots –but what about the BLACK screen of death?

Those of you who remember the old MS-DOS days remember the black screen with white typeface right? Well the only time Windows users see the “black” screen these days is usually when the turn on their PC, view the manufacture logo and then see the Windows graphic before the operating system boots to the pretty picture of their kitty, kid or their summer vacation as the desktop loads up (slowly) until you see all the nice program icons and Windows is ready.

But what about the black screen that stops on a message and does not load Windows?

My customer had one of the problematic, but less painful messages about a “missing DLL file” so I could have done a repair on the OS but opted to just pull the hard drive and transfer the data with a SATA transfer cable. Even though he had a USB backup external hard drive, he had not been backing his data up! He was lucky. I was able to recover his valuable data—thousands of pictures and music files—over 33 GB of data that he might have lost if he had gotten one of the scarier black screen of death messages like, “Your hard disk is about to fail, backup your data and replace your hard drive” or even worse “Missing OS” or “Insert Boot Media”.

This service call had a happy ending, but there have been too many times in the SOHO (small office home office) IT environment where the story does not end so well, like permanently lost files or expensive forensic data recovery. Please do not let this happen to you!

Backup your data. Backup your data. Did I tell you to backup your data? Your computer is a machine that WILL fail; it is just a matter of time and how prepared will you be when it happens? Will you be seeing the black screen of death and praying that when I arrive to save the day, miracles will happen? Or will you just grumble a bit but breathe a sigh of relief as you know you have backed up your data, because you can always buy a new PC, but your data may be impossible to replace.

I’ll post later about “The Who, What, Why, Where, When and How” of Backing up Your Digital Data.
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