Hi guys,

I have been working on fixing a Blue Screen of Death Error 0x8E. I already encountered this problem with 5 different computers and we always end up reinstalling the OS. I have been searching the net for possible fixes to this problem but all the recommendations did not help.

I am thinking that this may be caused by Windows Update SP3 or a possible video driver problem.

Symptoms are:
Computer cannot boot to any mode (normal, safe mode, Last known good config)
Already enabled VGA mode
Already done CHKDSK /P and CHKDSK /R.

A friend of mine suggested to uninstall SP3 from Recovery Console but I haven't tried that yet. I already reformatted 5 computers and hope this error message won't come back. If so, I may be able to try uninstalling SP3 from Recovery Console(which my friend suggested).

If any of you guys has a much faster and effective way of solving this problem, that would be of great help.

Thanks in advance.

Boot from the Xp CD and run a Repair

It happened again....

Ok, so the problem happened again. This is the sixth computer affected.

First, the computer was not able to boot to windows. I did CHKDSK and fixboot, still cannot boot to windows. I ran a repair install this time. Computer is stucked to a booting loop. I disabled Automatic Restart on System Failure. It gave me the BSOD 0x0000008E again.

Right now I'm reinstalling Windows (again).

Seems like repair install did not do anything...

I had one PC with this problem, appears to be a problem trojan or adware infestation - I haven't pulled minidumps to see exactly what triggered the crash.

There's a detailed writeup on Yahoo Answers, look for "blue screen stop 0x0000008e dell" and look for the question from Julie H (it's one of 3 results)

Quick summary: use Avira's rescue CD, but confirm that it's seeing your NTFS partition. If it's only scanning 10,000 files or less, you're going to have to boot to the Recovery Console from a CD and run "chkdsk /r c:" to fix any filesystem problems before the ntfs-3g driver that the Avira CD uses will mount the NTFS partition.

do i have to get an Avira CD? i dont use Avira..

It's a free downloadable boot CD. Updated multiple times daily. You'll need another system to burn to a CD. Under 60 MB download

I already done repair install before which didnt do anything. I think I will have a hard time doing this since I am troubleshooting computer problems over the phone. I just give instructions to customers.

Well, I'd suggest that they go to the Avira download page from another computer with a CD burner, burn the CD (download the 60MB program and run it, it does the burning itself), then boot the affected PC from that CD. The recovery console chkdsk stuff is only if they have problems with that.

If these are remote customers for a software package that you sell and you're not their primary PC support, I suggest that you send them the instructions I posted either here or on Yahoo, have them find a local PC support person, and have them give those instructions to that person.