I’ve been using Windows Vista on my work laptop since it was released to businesses in November and up until now I’ve had no problems with it. The other day, I turned on my laptop and immediately received the dreaded Blue Screen of Death. The problem seemed to be related to the virtual disk driver that comes with Virtual Clonedrive.

Virtual Clonedrive is a program that allows you to mount ISO images as virtual CD drives. I carry a 100gb 2.5″ USB2 hard drive with me that contains ISO images of all my CDs (Windows, Office, Visual Studio, SQL Server etc) rather than needing to carry around a CD case.

I booted from the Vista DVD and ran system restore which allowed me to boot the laptop again. Unfortunately, Virtual Clonedrive was left in a semi-installed state and was unusable. I backed up my important files and then restored last week’s backup (I clone my laptop weekly and store the backups on a 400gb external disk). Virtual Clonedrive is now running without any problems.

I’ve been using Virtual Clonedrive since I installed Vista and it had worked flawlessly up until this happened. Strangely, I hadn’t made any changes to the system that should have affected Virtual Clonedrive so I’m uncertain what caused these problems. Oh well, at least I’m back up and running again.