BSOD caused by DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL. Need advice to solve.

Hey everyone,

I have been dealing with quite the issue for the last few weeks and I haven't made much headway on solving it. During the first week of Nov my computer started having the occasional lockup where I couldn't control anything and it would then just die without a BSOD after about 20 seconds. I couldn't make out what was the cause since event viewer was only recording that the computer shut down unexpectedly. I tried testing all the hardware I could by using HeavyLoad to test my GPU and CPU, and using the default tests that windows has to check things like the hard drive and RAM chips. All came back with good statuses.

It wasn't until about a week ago that I finally got a BSOD with the DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL title. After looking in the dump file I found that the cause of the crash came from the following Bucket_ID: AV_storahci!AddQueue with an offset of 80. I was finally happy to have a cause of why my computer kept locking up and crashing, but I am still lost on which piece of hardware is the culprit. It seems like there is an outdated driver that is trying to access registers that doesn't exist, at least that's what I can tell. If I could figure out what driver needs to be updated or what piece of hardware I could just replace, then I could finally have my computer back to 100%.

I am planning on using the window's driver stress tester this weekend when I will have more time to monitor my PC. I will try to answer any questions you guys send my way and I appreciate any help I can get. Im not sure if it matters but I have had different ways my computer crashes. Sometimes it will lock up and shut off after 20 or so seconds, but other times it will lock up and almost immediately restart. Both of these dont have a BSOD when it happens, and Event Viewer doesn't have anything useful.

Let me know what Ideas you guys have and what other info you might need to help me figure this out.

Regards,

GD

Don't forget that you should also update your BIOS. Your are several versions behind. See if this makes a difference.

philc43 said:

Don't forget that you should also update your BIOS. Your are several versions behind. See if this makes a difference.

I wasn't sure if this would help but I went ahead and updated it. Sadly it didn't fix the issue as I got another BSOD within an hour of updating it while playing Fallout 76. I attached the new dmp file.

I did recieve a BSOD yesterday that had the CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED title instead of the Driver_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL and was mentioning that WIN8_DRIVER_FAULT was the cause. I looked a bit more into this error and found at least one guy who's problems were caused by a cheap SATA cable. I happen to have a cheap SATA cable in use by one of my HDDs (it was all I had when I built my PC) so I ordered new ones to replace it. I will continue to test my drivers to see which one causes me issues but thanks for the advice, I appreciate it.