I have a 2021 LG Gram 17Z90P-G.AA78F with an Intel Core i7-1165G7, 16 GB of RAM, and a 1 TB Samsung OEM NVMe SSD (MZVLB1T0HBLR-00000) running Windows 11. For roughly 10 weeks, it has experienced random blue screens and unexpected restarts, including INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE (0x7B), UNEXPECTED_STORE_EXCEPTION (0x154), CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED (0xEF), KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED (0x1E), and SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION (0x3B). Some crashes remain at 0% and others cause an immediate reboot without displaying a blue screen.
SFC, DISM, CHKDSK, memory testing, Windows Update, a repair reinstall, and a Windows cloud reset have not resolved the issue. The SSD reports Healthy, appears normally in Device Manager, and uses the Microsoft Standard NVM Express Controller driver. A new Lightroom Classic catalog made no difference, and the system also crashes when Lightroom is not running. After several crashes, Automatic Repair was unable to repair Windows.
Disabling hibernation/Fast Startup, PCIe ASPM, and disk idle power-down made the system stable for about an hour, but launching Lightroom soon triggered another INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE error. The SSD has reached a reported maximum temperature of about 84°C, although its current temperature is around 57°C. Safe Mode has been stable, while Lightroom is a repeatable trigger in normal Windows. Samsung Magician recognizes this OEM drive but cannot run its health or diagnostic scan; its performance benchmark completed successfully.
Before buying another SSD, what would you suspect first: the drive, M.2 connection, PCIe/NVMe controller, BIOS, power management, thermals, or the motherboard? What free diagnostics or controlled tests would help distinguish these causes?
4 Answers
Samsung Magician is worth trying, but OEM drives are sometimes only partially supported, so the missing SMART and diagnostic functions do not prove the SSD is bad. A successful benchmark also does not rule out an intermittent controller or power-state problem. Since disabling PCIe and disk power saving helped temporarily, test with those settings left disabled and compare normal Windows with Safe Mode. A BIOS update or rollback, if LG provides a verified one, would also be worth checking. Resetting RAM to its standard JEDEC speed can help exclude marginal memory settings, although the storage-related bugchecks make the NVMe path more suspicious.
The strongest software-versus-hardware test is a genuinely clean installation from USB. Back up everything first, boot from the installer, remove the existing Windows partitions on that drive, and install without restoring the old image or applications. If the same boot-device failures occur on a fresh system, Windows corruption and Lightroom become very unlikely causes. At that point, install the spare NVMe in the second slot and repeat the test. If the second drive is stable under the same workload, the original SSD is the leading suspect; if both drives fail, focus on the motherboard, slot, controller, BIOS, or power delivery.
I would also inspect the physical storage path before buying parts: power the laptop off completely, disconnect the battery if practical, reseat the NVMe drive, check the retaining screw and contacts, and look for contamination or signs of heat near the drive and slot. Run a long read/write or file-copy test while monitoring temperature and event logs for disk, storport, stornvme, or WHEA errors. A SMART “healthy” result mainly means no obvious recorded failure; it cannot reliably exclude an intermittent link, controller reset, overheating event, or motherboard fault.
The next useful step is obtaining crash dumps, because the different bugchecks could be symptoms of one storage or hardware failure rather than separate Windows problems. Check C:WindowsMinidump and configure small memory dumps if needed. Also check whether Windows is recording dump-creation failures. If the system cannot write a dump during an INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE crash, that itself points toward the boot drive, controller, or the storage path becoming unavailable.
The Minidump folder exists but stays empty. Small dumps are already configured, the pagefile is on C:, and Windows reports failures while trying to create dumps. The crashes often remain at 0%, so it may be losing access to the system drive during the crash.
Magician recognized the OEM drive but could only run the performance benchmark, which completed successfully at about 3394 MB/s read and 1471 MB/s write. Safe Mode was stable for around 37 minutes, while Lightroom remains a reliable trigger in normal Windows. That makes me suspect a controller, driver, BIOS, or power-management interaction as much as the SSD itself.