Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) boot loop

I apologize. I didn't realize that you'd responded this morning. To answer your question. When I boot the DVD I first get the language screen, I click next then it finds my windows installation and begins attempting to repair it. It never can. If I view the error details, this is what is displayed...

From there I can select the advanced repair options link, which looks like this...

I attempted a few things on my own today too. I first tried 'sfc /scannow' which returns the "repair pending" error...

I googled a few potential solutions to this repair pending roadblock and the fist thing I tried was to run the sfc scan in offline mode. The command I entered and the result was as follows...

I rebooted and wound up in the same BSOD loop, then booted back to the CD and attempted to run the normal 'sfc /scannow' again to see if anything had changed and it did not. The same "repair pending" message reappeared. Finally, I attempted a dism.exe maneuver that was supposed to revert any pending actions. That command and result looked like this...

Once again, I was back in the BSOD loop on reboot and entering 'sfc /scannow' from the dvd command prompt yielded the "repair pending" error. SO...I'm not sure what (if anything) is pending or how to stop it, but the computer originally froze while running windows updater so it seems plausible to me that whatever was running when the computer froze corrupted a file or two.

I wanted to give one final update to close the loop on this thread. After attempting all of the registry tweaks to no avail, I decided to throw in the towel and reformat. This is when I finally discovered the root of this problem...

Following the reformat/reinstall, I was back inside Windows after the first reboot. I then proceeded to install the Bootcamp drivers. The sound came alive, the wifi card activated...everything seemed to be going great. It finished and said that it needed to restart, so I clicked restart. Right away it jumped back into the same BSOD loop! ARGH!!! Fortunately, this time around the Win DVD was able to restore me to a point prior to the Bootcamp drivers.

From there, I was able to install all of the hardware drivers from the downloaded Bootcamp folder one-at-time. I rebooted after each new driver until I eventually figured out which one was causing the crash... Of course it was the video card. I attempted several versions of the Bootcamp video driver, I downloaded the AMD Radeon 6970 driver directly, and still kept getting the BSOD loop. It was super frustrating, and I even started suspecting a physical hardware problem...but it worked fine in OSX so I pressed on. I returned to the Bootcamp drivers folder and started poking around in there again when I found this file named ATIGraphicsLegacySetup.exe. I didn't have much to lose at this point, so I just double clicked it. The installation dialogue popped up and it was very similar to the ATI Graphics Setup.exe file that is run by the automated Bootcamp driver installation process. It finished, asked me to reboot, and then it worked!!!

So to summarize what eventually did work...for me: 1.) Reformat/Reinstall Windows 2.) Manually install each and every driver in the Bootamp->Drivers folder EXCEPT the video driver. 3.) Create a restore point. This allows you to experiment with different video driver iterations without having to reinstall all of the other drivers each time. 4.) Launch ATIGraphicsLegacySetup.exe 5.) Reboot

LonerT, I can't thank you enough for the time you put in helping me sort this out.

To be clear, the Windows installer utilized a standard VGA driver and booted into the os just fine...but at lower res. I've seen videos of the black screen boot, and that's not what mine did. The BSOD occurs after installing the Bootcamp drivers. And ironically enough, the proper driver (or at least a functioning one) is included with the Bootcamp package, but it's not the one that is installed automatically.

FWIW, I know that I've never done anything manually before to install drivers. I've simply run the Bootcamp installation package after installing Windows. I'm not sure what has changed? Did the latest OSX update alter firmware or something? If you'll recall, this all started by simply booting into a Windows installation that was running just fine when it was last shut down a few months prior.

I appreciate the continued interest in this problem, LonerT. Although I'm up and running again, it still bothers me that I can't quite figure out why things went awry. I think there's valuable information here for the greater internet community as well.

I have an identical machine in the office. This is the driver that it is using inside Windows7.

I will update this post later with an image of the driver my home machine is using. I'm very curious now if they're using the same one...

It will not boot into Safe Mode...or any other mode on the F8 screen for that matter. If I try to boot to safe mode it hangs up loading the CLASSPNP.SYS file, pauses there for a minute, then returns me to the BSOD screen.

I do have the Win7 DVD and it does show several restore points, but it will not restore to any of them. I get an error dialogue box.

Windows automatically checks for updates, but it will not install them without prompting me. That is what started this mess. I logged in and I got the "windows has found new updates" prompt. I opened that window and agreed to install them (83 total I think), but quickly realized that it didn't have my new wifi password and was therefore paused trying to download. I hit cancel and closed win updater to set my wifi up. Once I had an internet connection I re-opened windows updater and it started "checking for updates" and then froze during that check. The hard reboot from there is what brought me to the BSOD loop.

It took me a few days, but I've finally figured out how to follow your instruction. The keys that the link is directing me to modify/delete do not exist in my registry though.

Previously you suggested that I, "look in the Registry for any flags which indicate a pending update/restart..." I do not know how to look, nor do I know what I'm looking for. If you can elaborate on that, I might be able to find something now that I'm semi-comfortable navigating the registry.

That is correct, but my usage of the two machines is completely opposite. The office machine lives in Windows 7 (same os too incidentally) almost all of the time and probably hasn't been booted into OSX in several months, whereas the home machine is almost always in OSX and it had been a few months since I'd used Windows. I'm not sure off-hand what revision of OSX my office machine is on (I'll check tomorrow), but I am fearful of updating it at this point as that machine is "mission-critical."

Neither file is present. I might've done this already last week though. That neosmart page looked very familiar...

FWIW, I also reset the SMC and NVRAM today too. Neither had any affect.