Posts Tagged ‘BSOD’

When installing the software for my new Logitech C910 web cam, my computer started to randomly blue screen, then reboot. During one of these blue screen dumps, I managed to see which file was faulting before the computer restarted.

For some reason, ks.sys was causing the computer to crash, and upon looking into it, I discovered that ks.sys is related to the computer’s sound card. That made sense to me, as the Logitech installer was adding its own microphone drivers to the mix. What didn’t make sense to me was the actual reason behind the blue screens of death.

Upon further investigation and poking around in the Logitech support forums, I found that my Western Digital SmartWare was the culprit. I have a WD Passport drive, which requires the SmartWare application in order to access the hardware-encrypted data on the drive. It seems that the associated services cause the ks.sys fault, for some unknown reason. The only solution that anyone has seemed to come up with is to stop the Western Digital services while the Logitech installer is running, then restart the services afterwards.

So, I did just that, and my installation went off without any more problems. If you are experiencing the same problem, stop the following services before installation, and then restart them afterwards:

WD File Management Engine
WD File Management Shadow Engine
WDDM Service