When you work for a technology company that fixes PC's, you get used to seeing Microsoft's Blue Screen of Death. I typically run into it on customers' computers who need help...and occasionally on my laptop right before an important presentation. But in another nod to the digital age, I came across a Blue Screen recently in a not-so-typical place - My Gas Station.

My favorite gas station put in TVs that play content and commercials while you fill your tank. We can debate whether this is a good thing, but the TVs there like it or not. I drove up, swiped my card, and started filling up. That's when I noticed the Blue Screen smirking at me from the gas station monitor.

I was able to fill the tank without incident, but now I have no idea what movies are opening this weekend. Let's try to get a better idea of what's going on by dissecting this Blue Screen.

First of all, we can be fairly certain the computer is running Windows XP because of the Blue Screen format. The Blue Screen has several sections:

Error Text

Shown in red above, this section has a text value of the error code and is the most useful information. In my gas station's case, the error is KERNEL_STACK_INPAGE_ERROR. That doesn't sound good, and it certainly doesn't look good. What exactly is this error telling us?

From Microsoft's knowledge base we learn that "this issue can occur if a requested page of kernel data could not be read from the paging file into memory, or the master boot record is infected with a virus." To put that in plain English, it means there's something wrong with the hard disk, like a hardware failure or corruption of some kind possibly from a virus.

So what should the gas station do?

Troubleshooting Advice

You'd think the troubleshooting section would tell us. All Blue Screens have this section. Unfortunately, this advice is often the same, regardless of the error message. By now, everyone knows the first thing to try is restarting the computer. It also suggests making sure any new hardware or software was installed properly. This may not get us very far.

Stop Code

**Luckily** we also have the stop code, which tells us exactly where Windows stopped when it had the error. In the gas station's case, the stop code is:

The knowledge base tells us how to interpret this by looking at the parameters. The parameters are the four values in the parentheses above. By the way, these values are in hexadecimal format, which if you're a programmer makes perfect sense. For everyone else, it's all geek to me. Nonetheless, we need to press forward and learn what these four parameters are. The first parameter (i.e. the status code) isn't zero (hex 0xC00000A3). The KB tells us that if either the first or third parameter isn't zero, then the parameters are:

1. Status code

2. I/O status code

3. Page file number

4. Offset into page file

Finally, we learn that the cause of the issue is listed in the second parameter which is 0xC00000A3, which means:

STATUS_DEVICE_NOT_READY - Drive Not Ready: The drive is not ready for use; its door may be open. Please check the drive and make sure that a disk is inserted and that the drive door is closed.

So most likely, we can open up the gas station's kiosk and fix the problem by checking all the hardware drive doors. That was easy!