Blue Screen
Error 0x000000D1 When Installing Antivirus
A customer called with a
PC
issue yesterday, they have McAfee Internet Security on their computer,
but it had expired. They renewed the subscription through the McAfee
website and then tried to install the new version on their computer.
When the machine rebooted, they were greeted with a Blue Screen of
Death (BSOD) error message 0x000000D1 (DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL)
associated
with the ndis.sys system driver. The machine would flash the error
message on screen and then proceed to reboot and do it again.
The
ndis.sys driver is associated with network cards, however the system
would not boot correctly at all once the blue screen error occurred.
The system would not boot into Safe Mode either, however it would boot
to Safe Mode with command prompt. So, I booted into Safe Mode with
Command Prompt, then proceeded to run System Restore from the command
line by typing:
rstrui.exe
and pressing Enter.
I chose a date before the uninstall of McAfee and allowed the computer to
reboot. The system was stable after the system restore. It was a Dell
PC, so I proceeded to the site http://support.dell.com and downloaded a
newer driver for the Wireless network card the computer had installed.
I installed the new driver and rebooted. Everything was still working
and stable.
Now, I downloaded the
McAfee
removal tool
and removed the old version of McAfee Internet Security. After the PC
rebooted, I installed the new, updated version of McAfee from their
website and installed it.
Everything worked correctly without any blue screen error message or
other instability.
So,
when you encounter a blue screen error 0x000000D1 with ndis.sys,
download newer drivers for the network card(s) and install them and
your issue should be solved.