Hey everyone! I'm dealing with a frustrating issue after upgrading our Windows 10 machines to Windows 11 24H2. We've been testing both the April and May ISO builds, and now almost all of our 15-20 upgraded devices are experiencing random BSODs with the error CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED (0xEF), caused by ntoskrnl.exe. This problem isn't specific to one type of hardware as it's happening on laptops, desktops, and mini PCs alike. We've even done clean installs of the April and May builds, but the crashes persist. We had updated SSD and NVMe firmware on some devices, yet it didn't help. Interestingly, we have over 150 devices still running 22H2 in the same environment without any issues.
To troubleshoot, we made some registry changes related to HMB allocation policy, and while we suspected CrowdStrike might be a factor since it's on all devices, we tested a clean installation without it, and it still crashed. It's worth mentioning that we did a forest functional level upgrade recently, which might be connected to the timeline of these issues. I've attached some BSOD dump logs for further analysis. If anyone has insights or tips, they would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance!
1 Answer
I’m not sure how the forest upgrade could relate to kernel faults on your endpoints; it seems like bad timing. Could you share more details about your setups? I'll check your logs soon to see if anything stands out!
I got a bit sidetracked with real-life issues. Unfortunately, the dumps don't provide many leads. Are they all from the same system? If possible, could you share dumps from different endpoints along with hardware specs? One thought I had is that there might be something in your deployment script that's messing with security settings. Just a guess!