Microsoft really screwed up some of their August 2014 security patches, there are 3 which can cause you endless problems currently:
KB2970228
KB2976897
KB2982791
What happens is the 1st or 2nd time you COLD boot after these are installed is you get a Page Fault BSOD Code 50 in win32k.sys before you can even finish booting. Confirmed for all versions of Win 7 x64 and many versions of Win 8 and 8.1 x64. Now it gets worse: when you try and boot into Safe Mode to correct... it also immediately BSOD.
Here's how to avoid drastic measures that may do more harm than good...assuming you can read this and now have access to a working machine:
1. Go here http://www.hirensbootcd.org/download/
and download Hiren's Boot XP CD. This is a zip file that contains an iso image, use any common burning software to burn this to a CD. No CD or the machine you want to
recover has no CD ? Go here http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd-on-usb-disk and follow instructions to create and load this onto a USB drive.
Finally here's a site that offers several other ways to get the ISO onto a USB drive...I'm going to add this reference to the original post. BTW I will warn you that I've tried using Rufus several times and have had a 50% success rate at producing a bootable drive. https://www.raymond.cc/blog/how-to-put-hirens-bootcd-on-flash-memory/
2. What you now have is a CD or USB drive that can boot into a fully functional mini version of Win XP with a ton of good free utilities. At the opening menu, select Mini XP and let it boot you into Windows. Now you can use the standard file manager or any of several better ones all in there. We are going to remove or just rename one file:
Find what was your boot drive (it won't be C, that's your CD or USB drive atm) :
The file we want: \windows\system32\fntcache.dat
Rename it to fntcachebad.bad, rename it to anything else, erase it... whatever.
That's right folks, MS managed to screw up a single lousy fontcache data file such that it completely crashes Windows before you can get into it, even in 'safe' mode. Unfucking real.
Reboot, and everything is fine again.
You'll want to save the Hiren disk it's gotten me out of more jams than I can count.
KB2970228
KB2976897
KB2982791
What happens is the 1st or 2nd time you COLD boot after these are installed is you get a Page Fault BSOD Code 50 in win32k.sys before you can even finish booting. Confirmed for all versions of Win 7 x64 and many versions of Win 8 and 8.1 x64. Now it gets worse: when you try and boot into Safe Mode to correct... it also immediately BSOD.
Here's how to avoid drastic measures that may do more harm than good...assuming you can read this and now have access to a working machine:
1. Go here http://www.hirensbootcd.org/download/
and download Hiren's Boot XP CD. This is a zip file that contains an iso image, use any common burning software to burn this to a CD. No CD or the machine you want to
recover has no CD ? Go here http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd-on-usb-disk and follow instructions to create and load this onto a USB drive.
Finally here's a site that offers several other ways to get the ISO onto a USB drive...I'm going to add this reference to the original post. BTW I will warn you that I've tried using Rufus several times and have had a 50% success rate at producing a bootable drive. https://www.raymond.cc/blog/how-to-put-hirens-bootcd-on-flash-memory/
2. What you now have is a CD or USB drive that can boot into a fully functional mini version of Win XP with a ton of good free utilities. At the opening menu, select Mini XP and let it boot you into Windows. Now you can use the standard file manager or any of several better ones all in there. We are going to remove or just rename one file:
Find what was your boot drive (it won't be C, that's your CD or USB drive atm) :
The file we want: \windows\system32\fntcache.dat
Rename it to fntcachebad.bad, rename it to anything else, erase it... whatever.
That's right folks, MS managed to screw up a single lousy fontcache data file such that it completely crashes Windows before you can get into it, even in 'safe' mode. Unfucking real.
Reboot, and everything is fine again.
You'll want to save the Hiren disk it's gotten me out of more jams than I can count.