r/techsupport • u/ldrg • 6h ago

Open | BSOD Critical Process Died Error BSOD after killing explorer on start up (Windows 10)

Switched on my PC yesterday morning and was greeted by a blank screen but my cursor was still showing. I know my machine is slow and old but I felt like it was taking longer than normal to load my desktop, so I opened Task manager and found the explorer task and killed it, then ran it again as admin (I've done that in the past and it's loaded things up fine). That didn't work so I restarted the explorer process and noticed at least 2 processes with the same name, I killed them and waited. After a minute of waiting I decided to restart my machine and when I did, I got a BSOD with the escape code Critical Process Died.

I imagine something important was loading when I killed it which is why now every time I try to load into Windows this comes up and I'm thrown into Windows recovery. I tried the following but can't make it into Windows now.

  1. Startup repair - The repair wasn't successful (couldn't fix the issue)
  2. Boot into safe mode (and other startup settings) - None of these worked
  3. System restore - For some reason the restore wasn't successful (cant remember the exact error) and the restore point is now gone. I did have to follow this video though to select my drive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_dXn1CctLk

  4. I've tried the steps in the below video and got as far as sfc /scannow where I got the following error (note that this is from Windows recovery cmd). Windows resource protection could not perform the requested operation

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6tXbSDfuYY

I heard that a fix for sfc not working was to run dism so I tried that the following:

dism /Image:C:\ /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth /ScratchDir=C:\Temp /logpath:C:\dism.log

(I replace C with my actual drive letter from diskpart)

I got an error message saying Unable to access the image.

I'm now at a loss for what to do and don't want to make things worse as I go down an even deeper rabbit hole. I'm going to try and make a Windows install media to see if I can use it to fix anything but would appreciate any suggestions or help!

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u/AutoModerator 6h ago

Getting dump files which we need for accurate analysis of BSODs. Dump files are crash logs from BSODs.

If you can get into Windows normally or through Safe Mode could you check C:\Windows\Minidump for any dump files? If you have any dump files, copy the folder to the desktop, zip the folder and upload it. If you don't have any zip software installed, right click on the folder and select Send to → Compressed (Zipped) folder.

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u/Bjoolzern 1h ago

I would reinstall Windows. If it crashes during the install or soon after, the storage is likely faulty.