Can anyone help me with a BSOD of hell issue?

[HulkOSaurus]

Already made a post about that on various other forums, but at this point I'll take any help from anywhere.

I have a bad BSOD problem and I don't think I can fix it on my own.

I have an MSI gaming laptop which started giving off BSOD about two months ago. Tried different things, including Windows 10 reinstall and BIOS update, but it only ever fixed it for a day. BSOD would come back.

I had the unit shipped to their main depot in Poland and they changed a faulty sound board, as they themselves said. The unit came back with a document about different hardware checks being made and passed. Unfortunately the unit is still giving off BSOD.

Thanks!

[cypherusuh]

Any fancy error code when the BSOD happens?
There's way too many reason of that, both software, from OS/registry error or even auto run 3rd party program that goes haywire, and hardware, faulty anything or improper installation of it.
For OS, I'd try to use Ubuntu from USB, which should eliminate most of software-related problem

[HulkOSaurus]

I have something to finish right now, but I will try to get the BSOD code here and see if that helps.

Ubuntu from USB sounds quite interesting, but I've never done anything like it, so I will need to look into it.

[HulkOSaurus]

This is the error code.

[cypherusuh]

Seems that I couldn't see the image somehow

[HulkOSaurus]

https://imgur.com/0u15os1

[HulkOSaurus]

I'd like to tell you to google the stop code, but ever since Microsoft advocated doing that, it's been hard to find anything useful amongst the deluge of crud. You could also try googling the stop code with your laptop model in case it happens to be a common issue with your hardware.

Welp, WHEA is Windows Hardware Error Architecture. Your hardware is still failing. Or it could be a very badly behaving device driver, but that's unlikely.

A good starting point would be analyzing your minidumps or memory dumps. I recommend BlueScreenView for that. Microsoft's own WinDbg is another good tool but it's not beginner-friendly.
If all the dumps point to same driver file, there's your faulty hardware. If they point to seemingly random files, it could be faulty CPU/RAM/motherboard or perhaps something unforeseeable.

I can't vouch for the warranty repair quality of MSI (or any other firm selling gaming PCs), but at least your laptop passed their tests. Could be they aren't very good at their job. Could be it got damaged in transit. But you should think if there's anything weird in the way you use the laptop. Is it always getting normal air circulation?
And can you think of any patterns when the BSODs occur? Like, say, only during heavy CPU load? Or RAM? GPU? VRAM? Only during specific games or other activity? Only after the laptop's been on for n hours?

Thanks for replying, man. Naturally I will look into these things, but tomorrow . It will be quite the learning process.

In the mean time - earlier today I got a few advises from another forum and one of them was to run the laptop for as long as it could unplugged. It didn't crash. Usually it would crash after about 10 minutes of work. It doesn't matter if it's a game, or a video or idle desktop, it just crashes to BS. But unplugged it was running until the battery was almost dry, at which point I switched if off.

Is it possible that this thing is kicking off from a faulty power supply, cables and voltage changes?

I tried calling MSI today, but their lines are under maintenance - something that is usual for them. I will call them again tomorrow and see if I can get in touch with the repairs department and ask whether they were running the unit with my power supply or a different one. 

[cypherusuh]

Well there's a clue at least. You could try running without battery. If it still bsod, then there's something wrong with charging port, else, it's battery.
Or it can simply caused by faulty driver, since Google search also pointed out to display-related driver and "fast charging" 3rd party app

[HulkOSaurus]

Well there's a clue at least. You could try running without battery. If it still bsod, then there's something wrong with charging port, else, it's battery.
Or it can simply caused by faulty driver, since Google search also pointed out to display-related driver and "fast charging" 3rd party app

Thanks for the tip. I think removing the battery on this laptop might be easier said than done - it's not detachable like in other machines.

In addition:

I did another test today to see whether unplugged will work further.

This is what happened.

I put the laptop to charge while switched off. Once charged I unplugged it and did stuff for about 40 minutes without any problem, then I remembered that it was set to switch off within 5 minutes of inactivity while on battery power. I went to control panel to change that and it froze - no BSOD. I plugged it in and switched it off/on then went back to doing something and it BSOD within 5 minutes while plugged in and it gave this stop code:



I plugged it off and wait for Windows to restart. It went BSOD twice on Windows startup, giving an WHEA_UNCORRECTABLE_ERROR then it gave a message that Windows did not start properly at which point I selected restart anyways. It did go into Windows this time, but at that point I switched it off and went back to the drawing board

This is something coming from Obsidian forums:

''Battery power is already DC, wall power is AC and has to be run through a transformer to get to DC? So if the transformer (or rectifier maybe?) is bad... it causes fluctuating current and the over/ under volt protection in the laptop kicks in?

I mean, I would have thought that would cause outright crashes/ dying rather than BSODs or revert to using battery power, but 'bad' power from a dying psu can give some pretty baffling symptoms as well. I've also had plenty of non computer stuff fix itself by changing a power cord.'' 

[cypherusuh]

I'd take it to some 3rd party mechanics if it has any connection with faulty electricity tbh. When the shit hit the fan, it hits hard, sometimes as hard as buying new one.
Both error code refer to faulty hardware / driver somewhere, image is default BSOD hardware-related code while WHEA is code for sudden shutdown to protect system from data loss, basically side effect from it.

As for voltage, it should be handled by the charger adaptor, which is why you shouldn't use other laptop's charger, even when it fits, unless you already triple check it has exact same voltage / ampere stuff.

If you could open up your laptop, have you tried the good ol' classic "plug off and give hard blow on it" trick? Maybe your RAM socket are dirty (which hopefully might fixed your problem), else I'd just bring it to nearby PC service

[HulkOSaurus]

I'd take it to some 3rd party mechanics if it has any connection with faulty electricity tbh. When the shit hit the fan, it hits hard, sometimes as hard as buying new one.
Both error code refer to faulty hardware / driver somewhere, image is default BSOD hardware-related code while WHEA is code for sudden shutdown to protect system from data loss, basically side effect from it.

As for voltage, it should be handled by the charger adaptor, which is why you shouldn't use other laptop's charger, even when it fits, unless you already triple check it has exact same voltage / ampere stuff.

If you could open up your laptop, have you tried the good ol' classic "plug off and give hard blow on it" trick? Maybe your RAM socket are dirty (which hopefully might fixed your problem), else I'd just bring it to nearby PC service

If it comes to this, I'll definitely take it to them.

I will try to do as much as I can with the help of all the forums - which have helped immensely so far, and then I will either have a lot of information for that technician, or we'd have managed to actually solve this thing.

Anyways...

I am doing a memtest86 literally now, and I am doing it while plugged, as well. It has taken over 4 hours and it still has one more check to do, but so far it hasn't shown any errors, or frozen, or anything.

[HulkOSaurus]

memtest86 ran for 7 hours plugged in and gave 0 errors in the end.



Managed to open bluescreenviewer in windows unplugged. It froze once in between but did not produce a dmp file. This what I managed to take:

https://i.imgur.com/MWIfXfb.png

https://i.imgur.com/8C86zTe.png

https://i.imgur.com/K2jjkfa.png

https://i.imgur.com/oVbnx7W.png

https://i.imgur.com/xvcDYqv.png

On first glance they all look like driver related issues.

If anything rings a bell...

[HulkOSaurus]

Without analyzing those dumps, superficially they suggest a hardware fault, not directly related to any specific device or its driver. PSHED is WHEA's hardware error driver. HAL is hardware abstraction layer, the thing that talks between your hardware and kernel. ntoskrnl is the windows NT kernel.

From that and everything else you got (seemingly random BSODs when plugged in, doesn't BSOD when unplugged, halts when adjusting power configuration, doesn't crash when booted to memtest) I'm guessing it's related to ACPI and hopefully not a physically faulty hardware component that would have to be replaced.

These things are really hard to debug without having physical access to the machine, so many variables, so many things to look for and try... You said you've tried OS reinstall, and that fixed it - for a day? I assume you started installing drivers and software after that day. Maybe try booting into safe mode, and start removing/disabling extraneous stuff one by one. The URL in BSODs has instructions on how to do that.

Thanks for coming back.

I had it running in Safe Mode for a while today and it was stable. I was about to start uninstalling drivers when the thing went BSOD again(literally as I was about to hit WIN+R), this time producing an IRQL error. hal.dll+6deb ntoskrnl.exe+2acf6c 0x0000000a

After that I put it under Diagnostic Startup and it hasn't produced any crash so far - about 3 hours of uptime, although in this setup you don't have the option to put computer sleep off.

The Windows installation I have is from the image found somewhere in the laptop's drives - it isn't a pure fresh Win install, per se. It keeps itself updated and comes with all the firmware, although I wouldn't call it bloatware. I believe it does have a numbers of drivers with it.

I tried starting an USB pure clean Win install in the mean time, but I couldn't remove the write protect off of mine 125 GB pen drive, so instead I ordered a new one. I think it should arrive tomorrow.

I will also be calling MSI tomorrow to see if I can't get the battery removed from this thing. On the slight off-chance that might make a difference. 

Should I start removing drivers under Diagnostic Startup?

PS: I did get a fair warning when given the tip of using Windows Driver Verifier. If I can do that I can be a hacker... but I am not

[cypherusuh]

Have you tried using Ubuntu / other Linux distro installed on flash disk?

[HulkOSaurus]

Have you tried using Ubuntu / other Linux distro installed on flash disk?

No, I haven't.

I can look into that later today.

I've heard of Ubuntu starting from flash-drive.