A few days ago CrowdStrike pushed a faulty update for the Windows computers which resulted in the dreaded blue screen of death (BSOD). Millions of Windows endpoints were affected world wide. Social media was buzzing with pictures and videos of computers showing BSOD from various sectors such as airports, TV broadcasters, online shopping sites, grocery delivery services, banks and more.
Even though CrowdStrike quickly released the corrected updates. But for the Windows computers that have already become a victim to this problem and showing BSOD, Microsoft released their own recovery tool.
Microsoft Recovery Tool for CrowdStrike is a PowerShell script that downloads many components from the Internet to prepare a WinPE bootable ISO image. This ISO can be used to create a bootable USB drive. When we boot using this USB drive, it fixes the CrowdStrike faulty update problem.
This PowerShell script MsftRecoveryToolForCSv31.ps1 must be run with administrator privileges. First it downloads Windows ADK (Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit), then it downloads WinPE add-on for ADK. After this, we can add drivers if required to work on your computer while in the WinPE environment.
It generates two types of bootable media depending on the user selected options – Recover from WinPE, and Recover from SafeMode. In both cases a bootable media is produced which can then be used to access the device and make the changes to fix the CrowdStrike faulty update problem.
This PowerShell script can be run on any Windows 10/11 computers which use 64-bit architecture. The computer must be online as it needs to download many files to prepare the boot media. Furthermore a 16 or 32 GB USB pendrive is required for the boot media. This pendrive will be formatted and all the data on it will be lost before the boot media is prepared.
You can download Microsoft Recovery Tool for CrowdStrike from https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=2280386.