To Fix CrowdStrike Blue Screen of Death Simply Reboot 15 Straight Times, Microsoft Says
The advice, which is specifically for virtual machines using Azure, shows that sometimes the solution to a catastrophic failure is turn it off and on again. And again.
If this somehow works, good on Microsoft, but what the fuck are they doing on boot cycles 2-14? Can they be configured to do it in maybe 5? 3? Some computers have very long boot cycles.
There's nothing magical about the 15th reboot - Crowdstrike runs an update check during the boot process, and depending on your setup and network speeds, it can often take multiple reboots for that update to get picked up and applied. If it fails to apply the update before the boot cycle hits the point that crashes, you just have to try again.
One thing that can help, if anyone reads this and is having this problem, is to hard wire the machine to the network. Wifi is enabled later in the startup sequence which leaves little (or no) time for the update to get picked up an applied before the boot crashes. The wired network stack starts up much earlier in the cycle and will maximize the odds of the fix getting applied in time.
That makes sense with how the article said "up to 15 times" which does sort of indicate it's not a counter or strictly controllable process. Thank you!
I was thinking (from reading the headline) that if one specific component fails 15 times during boot or so, it will just automatically get disabled by the system, so that you don't run into an unavoidable boot loop.
But this makes sense as well, if they did write "up to" in the article (as others have stated). Even though I find the confidence weird. Imagine you have some weird dial-up or satellite internet solution for your system, which just needs time to connect, and then maybe also just provide a few bytes/kilobytes per second. This must be rare, but I'm 100% confident that there exists a system like this :D
Edit: okay, I should read first. The 15 times thing is said for azure machines.
Just imagine if it's a build farm with hundreds of machines. Jesus. That's a hell I wouldn't even wish on my worst enemy.
Have you tried turning it off and back on again?
Have you tried turning it off and back on again?
Have you tried turning it off and back on again?
Have you tried turning it off and back on again?
Have you tried turning it off and back on again?
Have you tried turning it off and back on again?
Have you tried turning it off and back on again?
Have you tried turning it off and back on again?
Have you tried turning it off and back on again?
Have you tried turning it off and back on again?
Have you tried turning it off and back on again?
Have you tried turning it off and back on again?
Have you tried turning it off and back on again?
Have you tried turning it off and back on again?
Have you tried turning it off and back on again?
Hey I missed one of your messages because I was rebooting. What did it say?
Hey I rebooted 14 times now, just as you told me, but it's still not working.*
:D
No no.
Have you tried turning it off and on and off and on and off and on and off and on and off and on and off and on and off and on and off and on and off and on and off and on and off and on and off and on and off and on and off and on and off and on again?
God damn it i've been rebooting it 15 times Gay. 🤦♀️
that was your first problem. if it was designed by techbros, always assume it's Straight.
Yep, that's definitely a fix....
It sounds exactly like a Microsoft fix.
Well in the time until Windows rebooted 15 times Windows 12 will be out.
the 12 is for how many times you need to reboot it when you first get it
We did get 7 computers back by 1am last night just by constantly rebooting.
That said, 40 out of 47 never came back. So clearly something more is needed.
Have you tried 15 more reboots?
there's an easy fix. it could be done with a single boot attempt if M$ hadnt made it so needlessly difficult to enter safe mode
Many of the machines in question will have safe mode walled off for security reasons anyway.
Most of our machines at my office run Win 10 or 11 and we haven't had the blue screen. I was wondering why we hadn't experienced this. Still don't know.
You don't use CrowdStrike presumably
Azure is MS's cloud computing. As long as you weren't using MS OneDrive, or 365 Office, or something else that relied on MS cloud, you're good.
Actually it's due to whether your company uses CrowdStrike or not.
Supposedly, one of the fixes (aside from rebooting and hoping it grabs the update fire) is to delete a single file in the CrowdStrike directory after booting into safe mode.
This is what we based our KBA on to get our users back into Windows:
https://x.com/timshadyeth/status/1814210120613847118?t=DsfwJAnEyqGInjLWHpvM2w&s=19
