Blue smiley face screen of death.

[PDA2]

After running an Avast smart scan I noticed that I had the blue screen of death with a smiley face. It said I needed to install an operating system. Could not find the operating system.

It turned off then when it came back up there was some type of diagnostic tool from HP. I checked the memory and then re started the notebook. I booted into windows without issue.. 

Is this a hard drive issue ? ( still under warranty )

[IT_WinSec]

Hello @PDA2

Thank you for posting in the HP Support Forum.

Your problem (known as Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) ) is kind of Windows self-protection feature. If you received a blue screen error, or stop code, the computer has shut down abruptly to protect itself from data loss.

Causes: A hardware device, its driver, or related software might have caused this error. What you describe could happen because of incompatible with Windows driver (most often) or because of hardware issue (rarely).

It can be verified 100% by performing hardware diagnostics and by checking the respective memory dumps BUT I think it is obvious what causes it. If it happened while running an Avast antivirus scan, then it is Avast and its drivers which causes the issue.

Did the BSOD happen only while running Avast (or right after it) ? Why did you run the scan ? Do you have a paid subscription for Avast ?

[PDA2 · Accepted solution]

Hi,

The scan was finished. I walked away from the laptop without closing the Avast program and when I came back a few minutes later I had the BSOD.

I ran the scan to see if some of the behaviors / issues I have been having might be caused by a virus. I have the free version.

Thanks for your interest and help.

[IT_WinSec]

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@PDA2 wrote:

Hi,

The scan was finished. I walked away from the laptop without closing the Avast program and when I came back a few minutes later I had the BSOD.

I ran the scan to see if some of the behaviors / issues I have been having might be caused by a virus. I have the free version.

Thanks for your interest and help.

---

By default, every time a BSOD incident occurs, Windows should dump part of the memory (or all of it, depending on the settings) to a file for analysis.

Ok, just to be 100% sure, please use Computer/File Explorer and navigate to

C:\Windows\Minidump

Check for any dump files inside this folder.

Select them (all or those with date from the time of BSOD) and upload them somewhere (e.g. your cloud storage account like OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc...) and give me URL to download/verify the information there.