Is it possible to change the driver of the disk you are booted from?

Markus Antonius

I built a computer earlier this year using a Samsung 990 Pro (with heatsink) NVME ssd (with Rog z790-h mobo, Intel 14700k, RTX 4090 and Win10).

About once a month I would get a crash out of nowhere (couldn't link to any particular program or situation (can't remember the BSOD code either but will see if I took it down anywhere)) But always new it was SSD related as the drive would not be recognised by the BIOS on reboot. I would have to unplug and completely power down the computer and restart a few times before it would get recognised again. Unfortunately it appears to be happening about once a week now so is annoying enough for me to take action.

Doing some research I found someone else had a similar issue and found that if they uninstalled the Samsung driver and installed the generic microsoft one, the problem went away:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/samsung-nvme-causes-bsod-after-multiple-computer/94aa7b45-b223-490d-9f4a-cd2a6add8639

But how can I do this if it's on the boot SSD? Would I need to boot from a seperate drive and inject it into the OS somehow or can I just go ahead and uninstall and reinstall while booted from it?

Markus Antonius

Update: On checking, it appears Microsoft drivers are already the current ones. So maybe I need to install latest samsung drivers to fix the issue…

Spear

That sounds more like the controller itself is locking up, possibly due to heat, if it's not being seen by the BIOS. Hence the need to also for a full restart of it by removing the power completely. A 990 is also a PCIe 5 device, so can run hot with sustained use. Does it have a heatsink and decent air flow?

Markus Antonius

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122589248#Comment_122589248

It has it's stock heat sink and is lying between the 4090 and the CPU in slot 1 of the motherboard. I haven't got a case yet, it's just lying in the open air at the moment.

Pointing a heat gun at it is showing about 47-48C and this is confirmed in speedfan software. The crashes seem to always happen when I'm away from the computer so not sure if load related.

smuggler.ie

any info in C:\Windows\Minidump ?
fast startup disabled in power options?
fast boot disabled in BIOS?

Spear

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122590941#Comment_122590941

I wonder if the power management is screwing up, as it attempts to hibernate/sleep/power down the drive during inactivity. Unfortunately the source of that could be almost anything, from drive firmware, to Windows to BIOS. Has the drive had the firmware updated yet? I have a 990 Pro in the very machine I'm typing this on, and I've never seen these issues, and that's also with the stock MS driver.

Markus Antonius

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122590995#Comment_122590995

I don't appear to have a minidump file in this location. I have no fancy fast startup settings activated.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122591386#Comment_122591386

Do you think it could have something to do with this in the power settings:

Maybe I could try turning off this power saving feature and see if that resolves it

smuggler.ie

Check if/what settings are set for dumps
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/win-10-location-of-a-dump-file-after-bsod/480de651-e4e3-40af-8959-d89304176a92

No harm to set PC into "high performance" power plan for testing(or permanent) as well as turning off link state power management. Take notes of original setting so able to restore, should you need to

Markus Antonius

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122596055#Comment_122596055

This is the location and filename of the memory dump but no file was generated. Maybe because the disk is inaccessible during the BSOD:

Maybe I will set the location to a non boot drive. Also turned off the automatically restart option as I can never tell if it was a crash or one of Win10s forced restarts. This would also give me a chance to read the BSOD code.

Also changed the power options as suggested above. With the 4090 and 14700k, the computer uses sweet fk all power at idle (or even when doing what used to be considered heavy computing tasks) so not too concerned about power usage anymore.

smuggler.ie

Check all options/paths. Dont see much need of changing paths unless you running low on space (dump file could be several GB in size) and want to keep multiple versions for troubleshooting purposes

Try minimize random changes and allow time for testing - you might make things worse without trace what/where/why/how.

Markus Antonius

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122598725#Comment_122598725

Will do, thanks! Haven't had any crashes so far but will surely report back if I do.