Video: Frequent blue screen of death ARGhhh security check failure and VirtualBox

For a few months I’ve had one blue screen after another, at least once a day. I scanned and fixed, but everything looked alright, aside from the sad face on the blue background that was telling me NOPE!- not all good.

So I got around to giving windbg a go, I have to admit I haven’t used it much before- but with all these juicy dump files stacking up I had a perfect reason. Ironically I had just spent a few hours with my mum teaching her about debugging and while explaining a stacktrace I used dump files as an example. I hang up, bam- blue screen again. Arghhhh.

And I was looking at the dump file again. And again. What the hell??

Well, it wasn’t hell, it was Virtual Box (close enough if you ask me- I knew I wasn’t wrong in first refusing to install that thing on my machine at work. Thankfully I converted the VM file to HyperV compatible one a few weeks ago.).

Looking at the dump file I can see that it is network related- and thus something is up with the drivers. Wouldn’t surprise they are not happy, the drivers- because I have many and they all have to play nice. VirtualBox was the bully on the driver playground. And it was easy to find out once I realized it was network driver related, a simple search for BSOD + network driver gave mainly VirtualBox related results.
So I decided to disable the VB drive. That went fine. Okay, now lets uninstall the thing. BAM. Bluescreen again. Upon restart I decided to uninstall VirtualBox, and that also gave a bluescreen. I tried twice, and tried to disable my own drivers before doing so with no luck and all bluescreen. (BSOD count in 30 mins: 8).

This is what I did.
I downloaded the drivers I needed, two of them (using properties – details to see which ones I needed in Device Manager).
Then I disabled and uninstalled them.
Then I disabled the VirtualBox driver.
Then I uninstalled it. No BSOD! Woho!
Then I uninstalled Virtual Box.

Okay, now we have a few problems….
I ran the installers I downloaded for the drivers doing a repair (as I hadn’t removed the software, only uninstalled them).
I still had some issues, with HyperV and some drivers.
I Turned off the HyperV feature and uninstalled the drivers. Restarted my computer and and enabled the feature again, restarted again.
Drivers looked fine now- but my Windows Phone emulator was missing a switch
I created a new virtual internal switch, setting the name to exactly to what it had before in case a config check is run upon start via the shell used to host the emulator when I use it from Visual Studio.
And now everything works. Yay. I think. Hehehe :D

Video: Frequent blue screen of death ARGhhh security check failure and VirtualBox

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