I've been having a frustrating issue with my PC that's throwing a "critical process died" Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). After it happened unexpectedly the other day, I could only get into the recovery environment. I've gone through a litany of troubleshooting steps: running SFC and DISM (though DISM acted up), running chkdsk with /r and /f on all disks, and I've even attempted to restart into safe mode, but it always just reboots back into recovery. Restoring the system, resetting, and uninstalling updates have all failed too, generally without giving me any clear error codes.
The main thing is, I did a memtest86 and found that one of my RAM sticks was faulty, so I replaced them both. However, I'm still facing the same BSOD issue. I also tried booting from a repair USB I made but it either just kicks me back to recovery or claims that Windows can't run on my PC during a clean install attempt. I checked my BIOS settings – they should be right as UEFI and TPM settings are correct according to Microsoft's guidelines.
Can anyone suggest what steps I might take next to resolve this? I'm worried it might be a deeper hardware issue with my CPU or motherboard. I'm open to running any commands or tests to get more detailed info if needed. Here are my specs:
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600
- Motherboard: MSI B450 Tomahawk Max
- Memory: Corsair DDR4-3600 (replaced from G.Skill)
- HDD: Seagate 2TB
- SSD: Kingston A400 240GB SATA 3
- GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 1660 Super 6
- Power Supply: Corsair 750w
- OS: Windows 11
2 Answers
You might want to run another hardware check just to be sure; sometimes new parts can also be faulty. If possible, test with another CPU if you can. It's a bit of an investment, but it might save you a ton of time and headaches if the CPU is the culprit.
First off, sorry to hear you're stuck in this BSOD loop! It sounds like you've already tried a lot of the common fixes. One thing you might want to do is check for any dump files from the BSOD crashes. They can give you more detailed insights into what's messing things up. If you can get into Windows in any way, look for files in C:WindowsMinidump and upload them to a file-sharing site for analysis. If the files are there, that could help narrow down the issue.
If safe mode isn't an option, maybe try booting with a Windows installation USB and access the command prompt from there. You can run some commands to check for issues or possibly enable logging for more info.
Yeah, I was concerned about CPU too. Definitely don’t want to buy one without being sure. Might ask a friend to borrow theirs for a quick test.