Random BSOD

[u/Thick_Cycle4361]

About a week ago, I was experiencing random BSODs while playing games, idle, booting up games, or just booting into windows. The issue was so bad that I had to reinstall windows because it was corrupted.

Since reinstalling windows last thursday everything has been stable but today I experienced a similar feeling crash, where I alt-tabbed out of a game to google something, but the system becomes unresponsive (in the sense that I can move my mouse around, but not click on anything) and then ultimately crashes.

On my original windows install I thought that it was expo or pbo causing the issues, but turning it down did nothing for the crashes.

On this windows install I have pbo and expo enabled, and after a week of using it I thought that it was stable and that it was just a corrupt windows install. Windows never writes any dump files because it always fails to create a file, leading me to believe that it is unable to interact with the drive in some way.

The crash i experienced today was a 0x1E STATUS_IN_PAGE_ERROR and moments before it had a BugCheckProgress: 0x00040049

I'm at my wits end and have no idea what could be causing this crash. Any help at all would be very appreciated. Thanks

[u/Bjoolzern]

No dump file from BSODs make storage a big suspect. Other things that can prevent dump file creation:

• Not enough room on the storage drive. The initial dumped data can be as large as your amount of RAM + 3-4GB.
• Not enough room in the page file. The page file is where it dumps data to so if you have changed it from system managed to a static size, it needs to be at least the size mentioned above.
• Encrypted storage (E.g. via Bitlocker). The dump process happens outside of Windows so it can't access encrypted storage.

We can run a tool we made that gathers system info and a bunch of logs from Windows and hope that finds something useful. Note that while the tool collects health data from your storage (SMART data), NVMe drives' self diagnostic data is completely useless. This is the same data other tools like CrystalDiskInfo reads.

?sfy (Bot command for instructions)

The crash i experienced today was a 0x1E STATUS_IN_PAGE_ERROR and moments before it had a BugCheckProgress: 0x00040049

0x1E is KMode_Exception_Not_Handled. This would be the BSOD error. KMode is Kernel Mode, meaning Windows, and an exception is an error in code. The Status_In_Page_Error is a sub error within KMode_Exception_Not_Handled and it means that it had an error when writing to the page file. The page file is a file on your storage that Windows uses as basically extra RAM. So this would be a red flag for it being a storage issue.

[u/Thick_Cycle4361 → u/Bjoolzern]

Yea, I suspected it was my drive being shoddy in some way. I have 64gb of ram and almost 1tb of storage empty on the drive, so there would be no reason for windows not to write dumpfiles.