Windows 10 for phones technical preview - Blue screen of death and recovery

[jobinthomas]

So I updated my spare Lumia 920 to Windows 10 technical preview build on Friday and have been providing feedback and using it over the last couple of days.

About a couple hours ago my phone was about to die and so I plugged it in. Now I figured why not give it a reboot while it's charging so I went ahead and rebooted it. That's when the phone went into a BSOD. Quite hilarious. Something about a boot manager file missing. So naturally I tried a couple soft reboots which didn't help.

Then I went ahead and plugged it into the Lumia software recovery tool and was finally able to recover it back after plugging it in a few times and switching to a couple different USB ports on the laptop. Gave me quite the scare.

The only things that were standing out to me/felt different before the BSOD was the fact that 2 apps wouldn't update - Device Hub and Fitbit. They would download-go to installing and then error out. I don't think that's related, but figured its worth mentioning.

I have been super happy with the tech preview so far. Microsoft has included a ton of features in there to play around with. I've been trying to test as many of them as I can. I have to mention it's not my daily driver. But I guess this could be the thing with any alpha software. Figured I'd post it for someone that uses it as their daily driver in case they run into something similar.

In the image the text looks blurry and it was blurry on my phone too (I took it on my Icon), I think it could be some scaling issue or something.

 

[abhishek singh21]

So I updated my spare Lumia 920 to Windows 10 technical preview build on Friday and have been providing feedback and using it over the last couple of days.

About a couple hours ago my phone was about to die and so I plugged it in. Now I figured why not give it a reboot while it's charging so I went ahead and rebooted it. That's when the phone went into a BSOD. Quite hilarious. Something about a boot manager file missing. So naturally I tried a couple soft reboots which didn't help.

Then I went ahead and plugged it into the Lumia software recovery tool and was finally able to recover it back after plugging it in a few times and switching to a couple different USB ports on the laptop. Gave me quite the scare.

The only things that were standing out to me/felt different before the BSOD was the fact that 2 apps wouldn't update - Device Hub and Fitbit. They would download-go to installing and then error out. I don't think that's related, but figured its worth mentioning.

I have been super happy with the tech preview so far. Microsoft has included a ton of features in there to play around with. I've been trying to test as many of them as I can. I have to mention it's not my daily driver. But I guess this could be the thing with any alpha software. Figured I'd post it for someone that uses it as their daily driver in case they run into something similar.

In the image the text looks blurry and it was blurry on my phone too (I took it on my Icon), I think it could be some scaling issue or something.

quite a few users have faced this issue. where their device would not boot up. probaby some kind of bug effected the boot logs and ate them up. its good that your device didnt 'DIE' and was responsive to recovery tool as well. with win10 TP the OS is still not pretty stable. so it was the best decision of you to rolll back to 8.1. future builds might be more stable and less prone to bugs and with which you can have flawless experience of win 10 good day

 

[jobinthomas]

Thanks man, yea I was pretty worried when I saw that, but after a bunch of tries I was finally able to get it back to life

 

[aplocher]

Wait, wait, wait, so the recovery tool DID work for you? Argh. I have a 925 and it's bricked AFAIK.

The same happened to me with the blurry/pixely text, and it's almost identical to a blue screen message from teh PC version (instead of saying "PC" this one says "PC / Device"). I posted a question here asking if there was a way to fix it - no response (ugh not enough posts on the forum to include a link??). Mine is currently bricked.

I ended up getting a Galaxy S6 Edge, but I still have my Lumia 925 sitting at home and would like to go back to WP8.1 and use it for development at the very least. With all the special treatment Microsoft has been giving Android and IPhone lately, I was on the verge of switching back to Android, and this was the push I needed I guess... Too bad, great platform, just not enough apps varieties and not enough API's available to developers to make great apps.

forum link:
social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/f2479d96-7065-4a01-b687-e9ff097e5daf/win10-tp-blue-screen-immediately-at-boot-hard-reset-not-working?forum=WinPreview2015Phone#f2479d96-7065-4a01-b687-e9ff097e5daf

 

[jobinthomas]

Yea it wasn't straight forward though. It took a few tries, a few times of rebooting and then switching it from one USB port to another to finally get it recognized by the Lumia recovery tool. Give it a try, maybe it'll work for you as well. It was a lot of frustration at first as the PC wouldn't recognize the phone after a few attempts. Then I switched USB ports and after a couple of reboots the PC finally picked it up. Good luck.

 

[Benny Vallejo]

Damn, my 1520 is doing this too. I installed Windows 10 on my phone a few days ago. I think what triggered this for me was my glance screen was freezing my phone. It wouldn't let me unlock my phone at all. I decided to do a soft reset and here I am. It may also help to note that my phone was almost dead when this started to happen similar to jobinthomas. When i try plugging it in to my PC (Windows 7 x64) it shows me a failed driver installation named WinUSB. My phone isn't detected at all by either the Nokia Care Suite or Windows Phone Recovery Tool. Let me know if anyone figures out how to fix this. This is my only phone right now.

 

[aplocher]

Thanks guys,

jobinthomas, I'm gonna give that a shot and I'll report back.

The guy on the post below seemed to have a similar experience (from what I can tell from Google/Bing's translation - I think he said he rebooted his PC several times before it worked):

www (dot) pocketpc.ch/microsoft-nokia-lumia-535-reihe-lumia-535-lumia-535-dual-sim-/224929-yor-pc-device-needs-repaired.html

 

[aplocher]

Oh and Benny,

Mine started acting very strange before finally going full-on ape-****. First several apps wouldn't start (store and a few others), but the phone worked. Next I rebooted it and the phone wouldn't work (no signal, ever) but most of the apps did. Rebooted again, same thing. Rebooted again, blue screen. Each time it was extremely slow. Like damn-near unusable. I kept thinking "they're goign to sell devices with this slow crap on it?" but now I'm thinking it was just my experience and not other peoples.

I think I also had Glance activated - at least I know I did with 8.1. Not sure if that setting carried forward to 10.

 

[jobinthomas]

Yea, hopefully it works for you as well. Try different USB ports too. For some reason one of my USB ports just doesn't want to do the flashing part, it'll recognize the phone and boot the phone to recovery mode but no movement from that point on. But when I used a different port it worked just fine. Happened with both my old 930 (this was just to reset it) and my current 920 as well.

I screwed up my 920's sim card slot so that phone is toast now. So using a loaner android phone from my sister. Good luck to you.

 

[aplocher]

Thanks again, and sorry for not reporting back sooner. I did what you suggested (other USB ports) and sure enough - it worked on my second try!

The funny thing is, I had just used my laptop and that same USB port (which failed for my phone) to revert my wife's 925 with the recovery tool after she saw what my phone did. It seemed the USB port and the recovery tool were working fine, but maybe it was too slow to interject itself into the boot process before the blue screen. I just realized that the left ports (the one that worked) on my laptop are USB3 while the right ports (the 2 I was trying before) are USB2 - so I think it definitely made a difference that it was USB3.

 

[jobinthomas]

Glad it worked out sir. So wonky like that. Either way, one phone saved