Extreme crashes and power failures causing system instability and major difficulties restoring Windows
Extreme crashes and power failures causing system instability and major difficulties restoring Windows
Hello everyone. This past weekend was incredibly stressful for me, could you lend a hand? Two nights ago (Friday) I was scrolling through social media while a game ran in the background on my main drive. Suddenly, the screen flickered, froze, and then went into BSOD—PC shut down completely. The crash lasted only a couple of seconds, so I couldn’t see the exact error code. Afterward, I checked Event Viewer, which mentioned a "kernel power failure," but that was all I could gather before I had to restart the computer because the OS was badly damaged.
Since then, the system didn’t respond properly. Task Manager, the shutdown button, and running .cmd in admin mode worked, but other programs launched normally. Windows Explorer kept crashing, leaving me with repeated black screens. I had to rely on tskmanager to restart it, though it often failed. After about 30 minutes of use, another BSOD occurred—this time during a reboot attempt. My UPS failed, causing the PC to lose power at that moment. When I tried to shut it down, the OS became extremely unresponsive and took over 30 minutes to close.
Any tasks I attempted would fail until around 30 minutes later, when everything seemed to finish at once. Running sfc /scannow and chkdsk didn’t help; they reported the partition was fine. Resetting the PC also didn’t resolve the issue, though I lost some temporary files. Some of these files were backed up from a previous mistake—specifically, I forgot to copy a Windows partition during a clone to a new drive. Others weren’t.
I tried Samsung Magician to inspect the drive, but it kept looping and never confirmed I had two Samsung drives on my Windows 10 system. My question is: should I trust the drive that was used during this incident? Am I confident in this PC now? Should I replace critical parts like the motherboard, CPU, RAM, or PSU? Also, should I stop using the UPS since it might have contributed to the problem? I plan to update my BIOS and run a memory check afterward.
I ran memtest86 via USB (since the OS can’t use the drive), it passed all tests. CrystalDiskMark showed the 990 Pro meets read speeds but falls short on write speeds. I’ll recheck once I install Windows 11, though I’m unsure when that will be. The search for drives in Win11 could take hours, possibly due to a motherboard issue.
I don’t understand the root cause of these random crashes or failures. The error codes didn’t appear clearly enough, and resetting Windows didn’t help much. Only Event Viewer logged "kernel-power-failure," which isn’t very informative. If you could clarify what the Event Viewer warnings meant, that would be a good starting point.
The BSOD displayed an error suggesting a failing SSD. You might want to verify if another NVMe or SSD is available for testing, as the problem could stem from your SSD rather than the motherboard. It seems a near-term failure is more probable.