BSOD(Critical_Process_Died) After Power Failure During Shutdown [Windows 8]

TKFT · May 15, 2014

Basically I can't boot into windows and the reset your pc option is not working.

Over the past 2 weeks or so we have been having a lot of nasty storms coming through and yesterdays was no different. Like i always do i went to go turn my computer off some kind of power failure, usually its just short brownouts or the lights flickering a little, After i started the shutdown i walk away to look out the window and a short while later I heard the computer shut off(at the time I didn't think anything of it but it was a fast shutdown and around the same time my light had slightly dimmed but again). What i believe happened was there was a slight drop in power which caused something to shutdown, I don't know what exactly happened but something happened (my only guess are that a drop in the power caused the computer to shutdown or maybe the processor crashed due to lower power I really have no idea). Anyways later that evening I went to boot my computer back up and I got the "Preparing Automatic Repair" and I wondered what happened and went oh well and let it do it's thing. After it finally got to 100% it rebooted and thats when I got the BSOD saying CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED, thats when I went oh shit, and it gave me the option to restart or advanced options so i restarted and the something happened. At this point I was getting a little scared. I didn't want to mess to much with anything so I turned my computer off and went online to see about my error.

Upon searching I found a few things but nothing to useful and basically came to the consensus that this wasn't going to fix itself. I went back on and went into the advanced options and started windows normally, that failed, then I attempted to boot into safe mode and that also failed. Next I tried a system refresh and that quickly gave the message "There was a problem refreshing your PC. No changes were made." So i then went into command prompt and used SFC /SCANNOW, somewhere online I read that would work, it didn't and instead said "There is a system repair pending which requires reboot to complete. Restart Windows and run sfc again. (What they don't tell you is you actually need to make it into windows for it to be complete) So I restarted my computer and tried again and got the same thing so I tired it again and then found out that I need to successfully boot into windows for it to work. At this point I realized I need to cut my losses and do a system restore. It wasn't so bad I had one from three days earlier and the only thing that had been updated (besides steam and steam stuff) was my graphics driver. Alright so I selected the restore point and hit next and then went to select my OS drive but I ran into another problem. In the list of drives under the status column it said "You must enable system protection on this drive". That was really strange, I had drive protection enabled I even had the restore points. Well I looked some more online and found no fix for that.

Today when I got home I went back on my computer and tried some of the same stuff again with no luck. This is when I pulled out the old windows 8.1 install disc and I realized that sadly my install of windows was fubar and there was nothing I could do to save it. I inserted the disc and booted into the repair mode and selected Reset your PC. Then I got this a message saying "Insert your Windows installation or recovery media to continue", well that is odd my install disc was already in. I popped it out and in again and a spiny thingy showed up saying verifying then "The media inserted is not valid. Try again." Try again WTF is that supposed to mean. Well anyways I tried again and got the same thing and then again with the same result. I really hope this isn't windows pulling some shady crap because you already have windows installed already and used your code blah bitty blah blah blah ToS, EULA blah blah. Anyways the only way to create windows recovery media is from your computer. Great, how do they expect you to create recovery media when you can't boot into windows.

So this is where I am left at right now. I have come to the conclusion that all hope has been lost on anything less then a full system reset but if anyone has any ideas or knows anything that could help me please tell me, I will try anything. That being said I need away to reset windows without access to any recovery media or away to get the install disc to be recognized as valid. I will try to upload the log file when and if I can find it. Windows said it put it in E:\Windows\System32\Logfiles\Srt\SrtTrail.txt one problem , the E drive would be my optical drive which has the windows installation disc in it, and if i am not mistaken those are read only. Also I have two hard disks one for the OS and almost everything (sadly I think I will lose all of it) and my other drive which has all my games, my school stuff and a few other random things. My question about that is the seconded drive shouldn't be wiped of anything when doing the reset correct? Also if it will be unplugging it should work and there shouldn't be any corruption to my personal data because the power loss happened during shutdown and that stuff should not have been touched. So should that be the case or no?

Edit: Ok so I went through the install disc I couldn't find anything. There isn't even a Windows folder and though I was not using a windows machine to view the disc I think the E drive my be referring to my main OS drive which is weird. I thought that no matter what the location of the OS was always the C drive but anyways looks like I wont be able to get the file unless someone has another way.