Abstract: Methods, apparatus, and computer program products are disclosed for analyzing and recovering from severe to catastrophic faults in a computer system. When a fault that cannot be handled by the computer system's normal fault handling processes, a shadow mode created by a fault handling virtual machine is invoked. The fault handling virtual machine executes only when the normally nonrecoverable fault is encountered and executes as a triangulated or shadow mode on the system. Once shadow mode is invoked, fault context data is collected on the system and used to analyze and recover from the fault. More specifically, one or more post-fault stable states are constructed by the fault handling virtual machine. These stable states are used to bring the computer system back to a normal operating state in which the component or action causing the initial nonrecoverable fault is avoided. Persistent faults may be encountered while the virtual machine is attempting to recover from the initial fault.