I've been dealing with random BSODs (Blue Screen of Death) for the past month, mainly while I'm gaming, and it's super frustrating! There haven't been any hardware or software changes on my end when these issues began. Sometimes my system doesn't even make it to a BSOD; it just crashes and resets with errors like 'Kernel-Power 41' and 'volmrg 161'. If I do get an error code, it's usually the 'UNEXPECTED_STORE_EXCEPTION (0x154)'.
Here's what I've tried so far:
- A clean reinstall of Windows (but the problem persists).
- I removed one of my NVMe SSDs, which made the crashes happen less often, but they still occur with only one SSD in.
- I updated the firmware on both SSDs with Kingston's tool, and they both seem healthy and in great condition (less than 2 years old and under 5000 hours).
- I ran a RAM test with MemTest86 for over 3 hours without errors and tried disabling XMP/EXPO.
- My GPU drivers were fully updated using DDU.
- BIOS has been updated to the latest version.
- All other relevant drivers were also brought up to date.
- I tested the SSDs with CrystalDiskInfo and Kingston software—no issues found!
- An SSD benchmark/stress test didn't trigger any crashes, but transferring large files between the SSDs caused a crash almost instantly.
- I switched off automatic restarts and saw the stop code mentioned.
- The Event Viewer shows a lot of 'volmgr 161' messages about failed memory dumps and occasionally mentions \Device\HarddiskVolume2.
Here are my system specs:
- AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D
- B850M AORUS ELITE WIFI6E ICE
- Kingston Fury Beast DDR5 2x16GB 6000MT/S (with tests at 4800MT/S still crashing)
- NVIDIA 4080 SUPER 16GB
- 2 × Kingston KC3000 2TB NVMe SSDs (currently only one is installed)
Crashes seem to happen exclusively under heavy load, like gaming or large file transfers, not during light tasks. One time, I crashed just by trying to start a game, and after removing the SSD that had that game and reinstalling it on the other one, everything worked fine for that game, but the crashing issue remains.
3 Answers
I suspect this could be linked to the recent Windows update behavior affecting SSDs under stress. If you have BitLocker enabled, turning it off might help ease the issues, though there's no guarantee. It's worth a shot if you haven't tried that yet!
Make sure your Windows is fully updated! Some users have reported that update KB5063878 may cause SSDs to disappear or dismount under heavy load. It's been all over YouTube, but Microsoft hasn’t acknowledged it. You might want to look into that.
I can’t even delete that update, it’s really annoying!
It sounds like you're in a tricky situation! Have you checked for any dump files in the C:WindowsMinidump folder? Those crash logs can give us insight into what’s causing the BSODs. If the folder is empty, you might need to configure Windows to create small memory dumps. It's vital for diagnosing the problem!
I created a Minidump folder, but it's still empty because the crashes don't seem to generate any dump files.
Thanks for the suggestion! I’m going to try turning off BitLocker and see how that goes.