Sporadic BSODs and application crashes

bigbobs · July 26, 2020

I am having issues with BSODs on a PC. I would like to think that I am quite techie and have built a few PCs without too many issues, however, the sporadic nature of these problems mean that I am struggling to fix, so I was hoping I would be able to find some assistance.

I built this PC around November/December time for my dad, and it has been running fine since. The specs are:

Ryzen 5 2600
ASRock B450M-HDV R4.0 Micro ATX Motherboard
XFX Radeon RX 570 8 GB
Team Vulcan 2x4 GB DDR4-3000
SanDisk 480 GB SSD
Corsair PSU (450 or 500 W, I forget which)
ASUS disk drive
Windows 10 Home 64-bit

As I say, it has had no problems since. A few days ago, my dad reported seeing blue screens and having applications crash. Most often, this would be his Firefox tabs crashing, at which point he would have to press reload. Sometimes, the entire Firefox application would crash and it would not reopen until a system restart. He did not note down what the stop codes were for the BSODs. He notes that the system instability started at the same time that the new Edge asked to be his default browser - a coincidence, or was there an update that happened at the same time? Other that that, he remembers doing or seeing nothing out of the ordinary at the time.

At this point, I took a look at the PC. I got the system to BSOD a few times, which seemingly happened at random and wasn't linked to doing anything specifically on it. I think that the stop codes that I saw were "MEMORY_MANAGEMENT" and "SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED". At this point I ran CHKDSK and Memory Diagnostics, which both returned no faults. I then attempted to install the latest Windows updates, which may have been a rookie mistake. He was running 1909 at the time, and I installed the cumulative updates fine, and then noticed that he was being offered the feature update to 2004. I hoped that this may help with the problem, however this update failed three times at the 'Installing' step. I can find out what the error codes that it outputted when it failed if this is helpful but I do not have them at the moment. Also to note, I witnessed the desktop crash (?) multiple times, where the screen would flash or show a solid white, while windows on top would be fine.

Out of desperation at this point, I tried to reset the PC. It was easiest if I selected the options to leave all the files and just reinstall Windows in recovery, but I do have the ability to do an entire reset if this is necessary. This too failed, as once it had rebooted, it displayed a message something like "The reset could not be completed. No changes have been made to this PC". I then tried one last time to update to 2004, which worked this time, however the problems persisted. I tried to take a copy of the Minidump files, but I think that the update deleted the ones from 1909 unfortunately. I have two dumps from since the update. I also tried to create a report as suggested in the pinned topic, but I left it running for well over 60 seconds and had no option to save anything under file (it was greyed out). Maybe I'm doing something wrong here.

The PC now seems to BSOD very often when shutting down, and as far as I can tell, with a different stop code each time. As well as the two mentioned before, I also saw "PFN_LIST_CORRUPT", but I don't have the dump for this one as I would have had to turn the PC back on to retrieve it, which would have then probably caused another BSOD when I would shut it down.

My research leads me to point to that these are some kind of driver errors, but I have no clue how that would have happened so suddenly. Do I just have to do an entire clean install of Windows or is that not the problem?

With how I have not been able to pin down one issue has been quite frustrating, and I hope someone has some insight. If there is any more information you need I will try to gather it asap. Thank you very much for reading this post.

Bob

Dumps link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dE5mTD19OeYvejRvdvUo_eqPbOT6BRGS/view?usp=sharing

Dimondminer11 · July 26, 2020

4 minutes ago, bigbobs said:

I am having issues with BSODs on a PC. I would like to think that I am quite techie and have built a few PCs without too many issues, however, the sporadic nature of these problems mean that I am struggling to fix, so I was hoping I would be able to find some assistance.

I built this PC around November/December time for my dad, and it has been running fine since. The specs are:

Ryzen 5 2600

ASRock B450M-HDV R4.0 Micro ATX Motherboard

XFX Radeon RX 570 8 GB

Team Vulcan 2x4 GB DDR4-3000

SanDisk 480 GB SSD

Corsair PSU (450 or 500 W, I forget which)

ASUS disk drive

Windows 10 Home 64-bit

As I say, it has had no problems since. A few days ago, my dad reported seeing blue screens and having applications crash. Most often, this would be his Firefox tabs crashing, at which point he would have to press reload. Sometimes, the entire Firefox application would crash and it would not reopen until a system restart. He did not note down what the stop codes were for the BSODs. He notes that the system instability started at the same time that the new Edge asked to be his default browser - a coincidence, or was there an update that happened at the same time? Other that that, he remembers doing or seeing nothing out of the ordinary at the time.

At this point, I took a look at the PC. I got the system to BSOD a few times, which seemingly happened at random and wasn't linked to doing anything specifically on it. I think that the stop codes that I saw were "MEMORY_MANAGEMENT" and "SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED". At this point I ran CHKDSK and Memory Diagnostics, which both returned no faults. I then attempted to install the latest Windows updates, which may have been a rookie mistake. He was running 1909 at the time, and I installed the cumulative updates fine, and then noticed that he was being offered the feature update to 2004. I hoped that this may help with the problem, however this update failed three times at the 'Installing' step. I can find out what the error codes that it outputted when it failed if this is helpful but I do not have them at the moment. Also to note, I witnessed the desktop crash (?) multiple times, where the screen would flash or show a solid white, while windows on top would be fine.

Out of desperation at this point, I tried to reset the PC. It was easiest if I selected the options to leave all the files and just reinstall Windows in recovery, but I do have the ability to do an entire reset if this is necessary. This too failed, as once it had rebooted, it displayed a message something like "The reset could not be completed. No changes have been made to this PC". I then tried one last time to update to 2004, which worked this time, however the problems persisted. I tried to take a copy of the Minidump files, but I think that the update deleted the ones from 1909 unfortunately. I have two dumps from since the update. I also tried to create a report as suggested in the pinned topic, but I left it running for well over 60 seconds and had no option to save anything under file (it was greyed out). Maybe I'm doing something wrong here.

The PC now seems to BSOD very often when shutting down, and as far as I can tell, with a different stop code each time. As well as the two mentioned before, I also saw "PFN_LIST_CORRUPT", but I don't have the dump for this one as I would have had to turn the PC back on to retrieve it, which would have then probably caused another BSOD when I would shut it down.

My research leads me to point to that these are some kind of driver errors, but I have no clue how that would have happened so suddenly. Do I just have to do an entire clean install of Windows or is that not the problem?

With how I have not been able to pin down one issue has been quite frustrating, and I hope someone has some insight. If there is any more information you need I will try to gather it asap. Thank you very much for reading this post.

Bob

Dumps link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dE5mTD19OeYvejRvdvUo_eqPbOT6BRGS/view?usp=sharing

Your memory is either running too fast or the timings are too tight. When you have those sorts of issues the ram is usually acting up. Try going into the bios to set your memory's XMP

bigbobs · July 26, 2020

22 minutes ago, Dimondminer11 said:

Your memory is either running too fast or the timings are too tight. When you have those sorts of issues the ram is usually acting up. Try going into the bios to set your memory's XMP

Thank you for the response. I'm not too familiar with memory timings, do you have any ideas as to what I should set them too? I lowered the speed from 3000 to 2666 and I still experienced BSODs. This time, "SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED" also said below "What failed: dxgmms2.sys".