Question regarding the practice test

Rulkiewicz

I got this wrong. Don't you typiclly get the blue screen of death after the Post, before the OS boot sequence...before you're able to even pick "Last Known Config"? How would I have known i was even able to choose a different startup option?

You are the administrator of a medium sized company. All the clients are running Windows XP Professional. At the end of a workday, you install an unsigned driver for a mass storage device on one of the clients. When the computer restarts you get a blue screen with Stop 0xc0000218 (0xe11a30e8, 0x00000000, 0x000000000, 0x00000000) UNKNOWN_HARD_ERROR. What should you do?

a. Start Windows in Safe mode and reinstall the driver.
b. Boot the computer from the Windows XP Professional installation CD and run Automated System Recovery.
c. Start Windows using the Last Known Good configuration.
d. Start Windows using the Recovery Console and restore the most recent full backup.

Answer(s): c. Start Windows using the Last Known Good configuration.
Your Answer(s):

b. Boot the computer from the Windows XP Professional installation CD and run Automated System Recovery.

Explanation:
Although answer d. restoring a full backup (including the registry) by using the Recovery Console, answer c. loading the Last Known Good configuration is much quicker, hence the best answer. The Last Known Good configuration contains registry information that was saved the previous time someone succesfully logged on, the drivers probably corrupted a registry hive. You can load the Last Known Good configuration as long as you did not log on. When you do succesfully logon, Windows XP will overwrite the Last Known Good configuration with a copy of the Current configuration. Click the link below for more information about troubleshooting startup problems in Windows XP.

Webmaster

How would I have known i was even able to choose a different startup option?

Because it's one of the available answers...

You can get a blue screen caused by a faulty driver at any time after rebooting as well. I.e. when the driver is called to perform a task that uses bad code from the driver.

But that's not the moral of the question, which is that if the computers fails before logging on (which overwrites the last known good copy of the config), because you changed something, the first thing you should do is try to boot with the last known good config. Follow the link in the explanation for more info and similar scenarios.