[BlueSave Logo]
Copyright © 1998 Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell
Last Updated June 26, 1998, Version 1.0
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            Introduction  When Windows NT crashes the system displays a
                          screen full of information about the crash that
                          is known as the “Blue Screen of Death” (BSOD) or
                          just a “Blue Screen”. How many times have you or
                          your system administrator wished that you had a
                          copy of a Blue Screen’s text handy for
                          examination, or so that you could e-mail it to a
                          developer? We can all think of better ways to
                          spend our time than by copying down an 80x50
                          page of hexadecimal numbers onto a sheet of
                          paper, one digit at a time.

                          BlueSave is the solution to your dilemma. Once
                          you install it, any Blue Screen your system
                          encounters will be automatically saved to a text
                          file so that when the system reboots you’ll have
                          it waiting for you to examine, e-mail or print.

                          BlueSave works on NT 4.0.

    Installing and Using  After you have run the Setup program and
               BlueSave   rebooted your system, BlueSave will be ready to
                          do its job. When your system crashes, you will
                          see a message on the Blue Screen indicating that
                          BlueSave has written the screen contents to a
                          file. The file, which you can examine after the
                          system reboots, is located at
                          \WINNT\BLUESCRN.TXT (or your equivalent System
                          Root directory). The file is only 8KB in size.

                          If you get a “One or more services failed to
                          start” error during a boot and the System event
                          log shows that BlueSave indicates that a device
                          is off-line, simply run the RegSetup utility
                          that is installed in the BlueSave program group.
                          After it has run reboot and BlueSave will be
                          activated again.

                          This trial version of BlueSave will record up to
                          3 Blue Screen images, after which it will fail
                          to load. At that time an event will be written
                          to the system event log that indicates that
                          BlueSave failed to load because a user’s account
                          has expired. The non-use limited version of
                          BlueSave is available for purchase at Winternals

                          We've provided the source and executable to a
                          program, BSOD, that you can use to intentionally
                          crash your computer in order to test BlueSave.
                          Note that this program uses a device driver
                          component to perform privileged operations and
                          is therefore not exploiting a bug in Windows NT.

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                      Download BlueSave Trial (660KB)

                   View an example of a saved Blue Screen

               Download BSOD Crash Program with Source (20KB)

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