P1 SSD Blue Screens Diagnostics

megalodonkatsu · July 7, 2020

Disclaimer: Posting this in the Storage Forum instead of Troubleshooting because I've outright bought a new drive to replace my SSD and this is more out of curiosity than wanting to solve it.

So I've been having problems with my P1 SSD in my Asus UX480FD (Zenbook Pro 14) laptop. Symptoms include various random blue screens with error codes "DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION," "BAD_SYSTEM_CONFIG_INFO," "KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR," and "WHEA_UNCORRECTABLE_ERROR". The first time I've encountered a blue screen was on opening the lid, browsing Firefox for a bit, then everything slowed to a crawl and eventually froze.

At this point I restarted the computer only to boot into the bios with no drive detected. After a few reboots, I decided to remove the drive and reseat it (works for old cartridge games, right?) with no success. But after a few more reboots, the drive eventually started automatic repairs, although unsuccessfully. Now I could get into the reset menu, but if i boot normally, it stops getting detected by the bios until a few more reboots after that.

I could now boot into safe mode, do nothing, and restart, and now everything is "fine" but after a while I would get the second and third blue screens, so I decided to refresh Windows (keeping my files). Everything seems fine after the refresh, but I once again got a blue screen randomly, then it was back to the bios with an undetected boot drive.

I confirmed that the problem was the drive itself by putting it into both of the M.2 slots in my desktop mobo to test them, with both slots saying it was empty when I had the SSD in it. Using Crucial Storage Executive, I updated the P1 to the latest firmware version as of yesterday (07/06). The program says the drive is in good health, but SMART values were not able to be shown, and every value was a 0. There were also some I/O errors opening some of the tabs in that program.

At this point, I'm really just curious as to what's wrong with my drive; I put it back in my laptop and now it "works" but sometimes still boots into the bios and I have to restart it a few times for it to boot into Windows. Are there any viruses or bad drivers that might cause this kind of issue? Specifically, anything that might result it being only sometimes not detected by the bios, but sometimes still able to boot into it?