Volmgr 161 + WHEA

@cwsink, the drives are correctly installed and pressed against the standoffs, the motherboard actually has quite a nice design for holding them perfectly in place. It wouldn’t be possible for them to be out of position yet locked in so I know this is not the issue.

I feel like it may be likely that there is a BIOS setting that hasn’t been set up correctly since the original builder, and me taking the cmos battery out years ago lost this particular setting, whatever that may be. Setting the nvme in “SATA mode” or stuff like that.

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The power cables are supposed to arrive tomorrow.

In the meantime, just experienced another BSOD. Had minecraft running, tabbed over to open a new google chrome tab and it crashed with the same error.

Dump collected:

MEMORY.zip - Google Drive

Your BIOS manual is at https://dlcdnets.asus.com/pub/ASUS/m...0GAMING%20WIFI. There is a test available for the NVMe at page 6.11.

The latest dump is identical to the earlier one, an NMVe 'surprise remove'.

"When you've eliminated the impossible whatever is left, no matter how improbable, must be the solution". Arthur Conan Doyle.

It has to be either the cables or the case, they are the only things you have not replaced!

I got all new cables and set them all up. Went to power on the PC, and nothing. Plug the old ones in, starts right up…

I know we have to be sure to really be sure, but what are the odds the PSU cables is the problem? It looks like to get it to work, I’d have to either get the full AX860 cable set or probably better yet just a whole new PSU and cableset. Throughout these last years I’ve been on the fence about switching to a high end ($2,000ish USD) gaming laptop from Costco, and hopefully not have to deal with this stuff ever again.

As I've said, I'm not hardware expert but that sounds like the wrong cables. I was simply trying to eliminate everything that you have not already replaced. I suppose you could try moving the cables slightly with the PC running to see whether that generates a failure?

I see that you managed to get dumps by switching your pagefile to your F: drive. Would it be possible to try the following I wonder....?

1. Remove the current C: drive SSD.
2. Re-install Windows to the current F: drive SSD (making it the C: drive of course).

It would be interesting to see whether the system is stable in that configuration. That would at least confirm that the issue is isolated to the M.2 NVMe drive somehow.

In my opinion, and based on experience helping on several other fora, the term 'gaming laptop' is an oxymoron. The one thing laptops are not good at it losing heat, and with the current fashion for thin and light laptops, it's even harder for them to get rid of waste heat. I would not advise a gaming laptop unless portability was a deal-breaker. Portability is the only unique feature that a gaming laptop has.

Understood. I experienced the same WHEA errors and bluescreens, happened in the same fashion, with the WD (F) SSD plugged in and Windows installed on it, well before I got the samsung 970 ssd.

I tried shifting the PSU’s cables around a few different times to see if I could get the system to react. Then randomly it would just BSOD again :/

I do appreciate portability, and also takes up much less space and probably draws less heat into my already-hot room. Idk, trying to think of the positives after what seems like wasted countless hours haha! Ha…

Can you upload the latest mindumps please? They should be in the C:\Windows\Mindump folder, you can zip them up and upload that to here. If that's empty then upload the kernel dump in the file C:\Windows\Memory.dmp to the cloud with a link to it here. More dumps might contain more clues.

Was the WD SSD in the same M.2 port as the current C: drive?

Might it be worth installing Windows to the HDD as a test? That one dump pointed very clearly at the (an) NVMe drive but it's risky making judgements based on one dump. It would be good to see whether the system is stable with Windows on a different drive completely. And just vanilla Windows and the drivers please, we don't want to potentially re-install the problem.

And I appreciate your frustration. Frankly I'm amazed you've kept your sanity as long as you have with this weird issue, but there is a solution. We just have to find it.

@parallelpark - Sorry if this has already been hashed out but the thread is long and I've not been able to find the information. Which m.2 slot is the system drive using? The top slot (designated in the manual as M.2_1) should (in some sense, anyway) be disabled when a 10th Gen Intel CPU is being used with the motherboard. It's not clear to me if that means the slot becomes completely disabled or just the PCIE 4.0 functionality.

I have already swapped out the motherboard when I was encountering the same issue. I feel like there’s a chance that it has something to do with how I’m supposed to “set up” the NVMe, and perhaps even the original builder (and the second builder) missed this step as well. All the dumps continue pointing to the NVMe failing, but we’ve tried using a different motherboard as well as switching out SSD’s. So the SSD port on the board itself is highly unlikely to be the issue, unless it somehow was the issue on both boards. However, keep in mind that when I sent the original board (Asus ROG z490f) into ASUS, they were unable to replicate the issue- this further confirms that the board is not the cause.

I’ve ordered the laptop and will throw it in this setup- would be quite interesting if it also bluescreened due to a peripheral! But, unfortunately I don’t think that happens and then a parted out PC will never be solved. At this point, I care more about finding out what the issue was rather than even having a working computer lol. It’s going to haunt me forever if we don’t get there. I’ll order a new full PSU setup and give that one last go with cable swapping

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@cwsink From everything I’ve read, it just disables the PCIE 4 functionality and acts as a 3, should be no biggie. The system drive is plugged into M.2_3

Is there a drive in the M.2_1 slot? I have seen instances where a slot capable of doing both needed to have the slot specifically set for PCIE 3.0 if the GPU was PCIE 4.0 capable. The default setting - which I think was Auto - wasn't stable. Or it might have been that the slot for the GPU needed to be set for PCIE 3.0 - I'll try to find an example.

No the _1 and _2 are both empty. _3 is samsung 970 boot drive and the _has the WD SSD. My computer is in shambles all over the floor but when I get it back together I’ll double check for that setting. I’ve heard of this as well and am almost positive I had this set up correctly, but doesn’t hurt to double check

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Got my PC back together and ran both the short and extended tests offered in thr BIOS for the nvme configuration section. Both passed with no issues. Looking forward to seeing an example @cwsink, i couldn’t find anything else in BIOS worth mentioning, so if you know of something in particular that’d be great. My BIOS is the Republic of Gamers (ROG) UEFI BIOS utility, it’s like dark red