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Don't panic!
Apr. 16th, 2011 09:20 amGreat advice. The trick, however, is to remain cool enough to heed it.
Yesterday was one of those days during which Windows Update insistently kept popping up, offering to interrupt whatever insignificant and unimportant activity I was engaged in to update programs I haven't actually ever used on my laptop, and I managed to fend off the insistent requests—Microsoft must've outsourced the routines to professional panhandlers—until I had finished working and shut the machine down to go to sleep.
This morning, the first thing I saw after my boot login prompt was the Blue Screen of Death, informing me that an attempt to load a driver named amustor.sys had caused an error serious enough to warrant stopping the entire process.
"Maybe this is an artifact of the upgrade process," I thought to myself, and being a former software engineer, I restarted my machine.
And again saw the Blue Screen of Death, for the same reason.
I then attempted to start the machine in safe mode, during which messages appeared informing me that there had been a failure configuring Windows updates and that changes were being "reverted" (I would expect it would be my system that was reverting, by undoing the changes, but hey, being a former software engineer, I knew what they meant).
Restarting my machine got me to—the Blue Screen of Death.
I Googled the name of the file causing the crash, not to find out if it was malware (long ago, I noticed that sites specializing in fixing malware problems have a tendency to label just about every file as a "potential" problem), but to figure out what it was supposed to do. It turns out the amustor.sys driver apparently is in charge of the card reader on my laptop, so—in order to not give the driver anything to work with, so to speak—I decided to remove the SD card (which pretty much sits in the card reader slot permanently) and then I restarted the machine.
This time there was no Blue Screen. I saw the same messages about the Windows update configuration failure and about reverting the changes, after which the update was reapplied and the machine restarted (again without the SD card in the slot).
Oh, rapture! The system started up and I logged in to review the translations I had written yesterday. And just a few minutes ago, I sent them off to the client.
While I walk around today, I shall have to give some thought to automating (and making transparent) the process of backing up work files to an external drive (or maybe the cloud), because one of these days, I may not be so lucky.
Cheers...
Yesterday was one of those days during which Windows Update insistently kept popping up, offering to interrupt whatever insignificant and unimportant activity I was engaged in to update programs I haven't actually ever used on my laptop, and I managed to fend off the insistent requests—Microsoft must've outsourced the routines to professional panhandlers—until I had finished working and shut the machine down to go to sleep.
This morning, the first thing I saw after my boot login prompt was the Blue Screen of Death, informing me that an attempt to load a driver named amustor.sys had caused an error serious enough to warrant stopping the entire process.
"Maybe this is an artifact of the upgrade process," I thought to myself, and being a former software engineer, I restarted my machine.
And again saw the Blue Screen of Death, for the same reason.
I then attempted to start the machine in safe mode, during which messages appeared informing me that there had been a failure configuring Windows updates and that changes were being "reverted" (I would expect it would be my system that was reverting, by undoing the changes, but hey, being a former software engineer, I knew what they meant).
Restarting my machine got me to—the Blue Screen of Death.
I Googled the name of the file causing the crash, not to find out if it was malware (long ago, I noticed that sites specializing in fixing malware problems have a tendency to label just about every file as a "potential" problem), but to figure out what it was supposed to do. It turns out the amustor.sys driver apparently is in charge of the card reader on my laptop, so—in order to not give the driver anything to work with, so to speak—I decided to remove the SD card (which pretty much sits in the card reader slot permanently) and then I restarted the machine.
This time there was no Blue Screen. I saw the same messages about the Windows update configuration failure and about reverting the changes, after which the update was reapplied and the machine restarted (again without the SD card in the slot).
Oh, rapture! The system started up and I logged in to review the translations I had written yesterday. And just a few minutes ago, I sent them off to the client.
While I walk around today, I shall have to give some thought to automating (and making transparent) the process of backing up work files to an external drive (or maybe the cloud), because one of these days, I may not be so lucky.
Cheers...
