Repeated crashes during startup are likely due to system instability.
Repeated crashes during startup are likely due to system instability.
Hello everyone, roughly two months back my PC was running smoothly. Around three weeks ago I began experiencing occasional BSODs, mainly during gameplay. After some troubleshooting, I turned off EXPO/XMP and the problems stopped for a week. Yesterday the BSODs returned, focusing on memory-related errors like "page found in unpaged area, kernel heap, and critical process died." I ran MemTest86 on both RAM modules and they passed. My NVMe SSD is at 98% health, and I’m using a Pigtailed PCIe cable from the PSU for one of the slots. At this stage I’m unsure and prefer not to replace RAM unless necessary. Here’s my current setup: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3d Dark Rock Pro 4 CPU cooler, MSI B650 Gaming Plus WIFI ATX board, Corsair Vengeance 64 GB DDR5-5600 CL40, Samsung 980 Pro 2 TB M.2-2280 NVMe SSD, and a PNY OC GeForce RTX 5070 Ti with 16GB video card. The power supply is 850W, 80+ Gold certified and fully modular. What might be behind these BSODs? Any advice would be really helpful as I need the system stable for my studies.
If your memory wasn't stable there's a small possibility that it corrupted the OS over time, though it doesn't make sense that it was fine for a week. Is your SSD reporting fine? There were issues with the firmware with these. Is there anything in the event viewer of note? Particularly WHEA errors.
Up to now, I've noticed no issues with my SSD. In the event viewer, the only problems I remember were related to TPM and WMI errors.
Use WinDbg to explore more details about the BSODs. This tool can examine minidump files after each crash, which proved useful several times when diagnosing a PC issue. The event viewer and error messages didn’t help much, but it pointed toward a problematic driver. You can download it here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/window.../debugger/ A helpful tutorial is available at https://www.wikihow.com/Read-Dump-Files
Navigate to C:\Windows\Minidump and verify presence of minidump files. If found, return to Windows and transfer the Minidump directory to the Downloads folder (desktop works if OneDrive isn't syncing). Compress the copied folder and include it in a post.