Windows and BSOD - surprise

Mike-VA3MW

Over the weekend, while working at the remote (the weather was warm) my trusty Win10 Pro IBM Think Pad Blue Screened with a 21A stop code.

I thought I would share what I did. This story isn't about just error, but an idea when there are weird things happening to your PC.

What is Stop Code 0xc000021a & how it occurs?

The stop code 0xc000021a represents the WINLOGON_FATAL_ERROR, which occurs when a user-mode subsystem, such as WinLogon or Client Server Run-Time Subsystem (CSRSS), is compromised. It additionally means that security can’t be guaranteed for your system due to this error. And in turn, the Windows Operating System (OS) switches to the kernel-mode, showing a blue screen.

There are a few quality documents about how to recover from this, but, for me, none worked. I pulled the drive, copied off the documents for safekeeping, ran some utilities to fix the issue and then put the drive back into Laptop. It still wouldn't boot.

One of the Windows options was to reinstall Windows and keep your documents. This pops up with a few tools and recovery options.

I gave that a try and that worked as expected the machine started right up with all my documents in place. I had to spend an hour reinstalling the IBM drivers and those are easy to find since you can search by serial number.

The reason I am writing this is that there was a great report on the desktop of all the programs I had installed. Over 200 programs and as I read through them, I only use about 10 of them today.

I guess I was forced into a bloatware clean up (caused by me). This laptop now flies.

The reason I share this is that if you are having some strange Windows issues, starting clean isn't always the worst idea and it gave the PC a clean start.

Again, you may wish to consider this if you start to deal with issues you can't seem to track down to resolve.

73 es HNY de va3mw