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Certain BSODs (e.g., 0xc000021a) will say that the system has been shut down to prevent further problems. Obviously this is not actually the case since the message can be viewed on screen, however, the hard-drives are shut down. This is quite annoying because it adds unnecessary wear and tear to the drive and in all likelihood, the user is going to press the Reset button to reboot, requiring the drives to spin up again anyway.

Does anybody know of a way to configure Windows so that it does not turn off the hard-drives on a BSOD? There do not seem to be any related options that I can find; only an option to not reboot which is already selected.

Synetech
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2 Answers2

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Upon a reboot, everything gets reinitialized, even your hard drives. They couldn't get reinitialized without first spinning down and up again, this is similar to doing a reboot in which it also changes the speed of the drive. Keeping the drives in the state they were in at the crash is a very bad idea, especially when you are experiencing hardware related crashes.

I would be far more concerned as to why you are experiencing BSODs than to why you want to do this, apart from a Graphics issue that I resolved I never had any BSODs and you shouldn't have much either. You are better off obtaining a stable system than trying to do something that does not really matter.

Technically, one could rework the hardware / BIOS / OS to behave that way but that would be a high cost for a very small benefit. Currently, Windows can't do this because it has no control over it; I even doubt if someone ever had the idea to implement support for this kind of idea. The D really stands for Death...

Tip: If you want to spare out wear / tear, try minimizing the disk I/O your operating system performs. I would be far more concerned about the head than the platter(s), because the platter(s) are meant to rotate anyway. I often hear disk recovery stories where the heads got affected first, so I would think of it as the weakest component, of course statistics might tell otherwise. That's as far as I've heard about it...

Tamara Wijsman
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Actually, the drive is stopped for all the OS is concerned. The Blue Screen you see is quite exceptional because the file system driver itself could be the cause of the stop error. Which is why the core dump is written to the root of the system drive.

For all intents and purposes, the OS has no other control.

The fans spinning, hardrive moving, lights flashing are controlled by your BIOS/Motherboard/Powersuppy, which are outside the control of your OS. For more support, you should ask them.

surfasb
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