BSOD and reboot every 24 hours and 16 minutes

I recently encountered an identical problem on a customer's Dell Inspiron 531. Everything was the same. 24 hour and 16 minute reboot time. Ability to restart the clock by manually rebooting. Always a DPC Watchdog Violation. Always the same parameters BugCheck 133, {0, 501, 500, 0}. Always the same files in the stack: ntoskrnl.exe, nvstor.sys and halmacpi.dll. Occasionally, hal.dll would replace halmacpi.dll.

The solution was as follows: Go to device manager. Click on Storage Controllers then NVIDIA nForce Serial ATA Controller. Right click on those and update driver, select 'browse for driver' and then 'let me pick'. Change the driver to Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller. You have to do this for each and every NVIDIA nForce Serial ATA Controller entry. Now reboot the computer.

You can now see how long the computer has been running by calling up Task Manager, clicking on the performance tab and looking at the up time statistic.

What you are effectively doing with this solution is replacing NVIDIA's storage driver with the generic one included with Windows 10.

There appears to be an incompatibility between the NVIDIA storage driver (nvstor.sys) and Microsoft's anniversary update to Windows 10. You can see this by doing the following: Look in Event Viewer for Kernel Power critical errors. Sort by date. You will notice that the time and dates correspond to the the time and dates of your DPC Watchdog violations. Make a note of the time and date of the first Kernel Power error. Go to Control Panel => Programs and Features => Show all updates. Sort by date. You will probably find that KB3176936, KB3176937 and KB3176935 were installed the day before the problem started. These are the (1607) anniversary update.


I would like to take credit for this solution, but I found it in the following thread on pages 6 and 7. Thanks to user khamseen.

fobdstn, thank you so much for posting your thoughts on this problem. I am very anxious to give your proposed solution a try. I have just replaced the drivers that you suggested.

Barring any forced Windows Update, I should know by late tomorrow whether or not this solves the problem.

I am very optimistic given the similarity of the problem that you observed and my suspicion that my issue began with the Windows 10 Anniversary update. In fact, I did as you suggested and found that my Kernel-Power critical events began on Sept. 26. The three Anniversary updates that you mention were installed on Sept. 25!

This may end three months of enduring this problem every single day.

Thanks again.

Apparent Success! My system has been running for 25 hours and 18 minutes without a shutdown! For the first time in 3 months, it has lasted more than a day. Thanks so much for the help.

Glad that it worked out for you.

When I first encountered this problem, I lost my shirt on the job. However, I really wanted to help the 80 year old lady avoid buying a new computer since her old Dell was more than capable of meeting her needs. Since then the problem has shown up on several other computers and it has been easy to fix with this workaround.

Hopefully, Microsoft and NVIDIA will fix the problem. Unfortunately, they have no incentive to do so.