BSOD Loop - Very Dangerous - Broke my PC / win10 installation

[b4ti1c]

Game crashed, and then win10 crashed with a blue screen of death. Now I cannot even restart my PC, it always throws me a BSOD.

My specs:

i7 3770
16GB DDR3 Ram
Asus z77 motherboard
Asus GTX 1070 - DUAL
Intel SSD for windows, another dedicated Intel SSD for Steam
64-bit Win10 LTSB - 2016b

In-game time:
Doing Fake Groschen quest. After killing bandits to save Esther, I went on to talk to her. Then, this happened.

Problem:
My PC cannot boot anymore! Blue-screen of death (BSOD) loop with different kinds of error codes all around. Each time pc tries to boot, some different error from below fires up.
BAD_POOL_HEADER, KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED, SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION, CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED, 0x000021a

In-game time vs problem more detailed:
While fighting around the mines, I got my very first BSOD. I restarted my pc without a problem. Not giving it much attention to the BSOD, I moved on.
Later on, I ran into the quest-related cave by chance. There I saved the game using schnapps. Realizing moving forward ends the quest, I loaded back my saved game and went outside to save esther first. After killing the bandits there, I went to talk to her and game crashed.
I launched back the game, however things were bizarre:
- In main menu, camera had fallen down in z-axis; that is, the background scene was above the camera. Thats why probably all the textures were rendered invisible (because camera was behind, or inside the objects). The camera did not move, but its position was lower than what it was supposed to be.
- Also in main menu, the camera showed the hands of Henry executing the falling animation. Actually, the animation did not execute, camera showed a static image; but hands were lifted up as if Henry was falling
- I loaded my saved game inside the mines
- When I moved, my bow did not. When I moved back, I saw my bow. It was static. Not only that, there was this NPC which runs back at the mines normally. He also stood still, showing no reaction. I went up to him but could not interact.
- When I opened up my inventory, there was only 1 yellow curf or something inside. Nothing was there.
- While I was closing my inventory, I had my second BSOD
- Until then, I have been getting BSODs everywhere. While computer boots, while windows repairs. Sometimes Win10 allows you to skip diskchecking, and if I do that I can manage to login. But it takes only 2-3 minutes for the pc to come up with another BSOD.

Solution:
No solutions so far. I have been trying different things. The solution is not game related anymore. At the moment, I am running chkdsk /f /r on C drive using the windows repair tools available before windows boot. It takes a couple of hours. If that does not solve, than I will need to re-install Windows. Will post an update on this.

Beware; this really is a killer problem. I have been really enjoying the game a lot, and enduring the countless bugs and crashes without frustration. This issue sounds like a distinct driver-related thing rather than the game itself; however I had a stable system for months without any crashes, and now I have only this game to blame for. My first BSOD in win10. Also happens to be my first BSOD-loop in my entire winXP to win10 experience.


I acknowledge people thinking that this might be real hardware failure. It is not. I have two other dedicated disks for MacOS and win7 which boot-up fine with the same hardware.

Also, nothing is attached to this PC except mouse, keyboard, ethernet, hdmi and power cables

[Hinkle]

Clear issue is that your hardware failed. Don't blame the game.

[Isha]

It seems to me you fried your CPU bro. Those early BSODs were because it was overheating.

[b4ti1c]

I'm sorry but it is not. My mistake was to ignore to first BSOD that broke down the win10 installation. Later on, these errors are just what windows throws at you. If you think I have not been grinding google for the past 3-4 hours, then you are mistaken.

As far as I see, this issue is caused by GPU writing stuff to kernel memory by mistake. Than windows cannot boot anymore

By the way, I will definitely launch the game the moment I come over this thing.

[b4ti1c]

To all of you guys thinking a physical hardware failure, I have another disk with Mavericks installed, and another one with Win7 installed. These disks boot up fine.

[Stick]

Originally posted by batilc:

I'm sorry but it is not. My mistake was to ignore to first BSOD that broke down the win10 installation. ... snip...

Had close to the same thing... back when The Division first came out... had a game crash... ended up having to hard power my system off to get out of the game... *eeerrrrrrrr...*

BSOD... only fix was eventually doing a reinstall/repair of Win 10... no problems since *whew*

[hawkeye]

Usual process is to do a repair from the windows installation disk.
It should work.
If not post back here or better still to the hardware forum under the Community menu.

[Isha]

If it boots other OS then try eliminating possibilities. Lower your clock speed by a fair bit, try underclocking, then booting windows 10. If it still doesn't boot then maybe your CPU isn't the problem.

[Battleseed]

OP there is no cause and effect of the game your BSOD.

[hawkeye]

Originally posted by Battleseed:

OP there is no cause and effect of the game your BSOD.

There is, but indirectly.

When a gpu is running under load it draws more power from the psu. If the capacitors in the psu are old or low quality, the ripple on the 12v feed from the psu can start to go pear-shaped. The gpu responds by trying tto draw more power. Vicious circle is the result. The system gets unstable and psu cuts off, driver crashes or bsod, depending on which component fails first.

Windows will have files open which won't be closed correctly = potential corruption = bsod when booting.

[Battleseed]

Originally posted by hawkeye:

Originally posted by Battleseed:

OP there is no cause and effect of the game your BSOD.

There is, but indirectly.

When a gpu is running under load it draws more power from the psu. If the capacitors in the psu are old or low quality, the ripple on the 12v feed from the psu can start to go pear-shaped. The gpu responds by trying tto draw more power. Vicious circle is the result. The system gets unstable and psu cuts off, driver crashes or bsod, depending on which component fails first.

Windows will have files open which won't be closed correctly = potential corruption = bsod when booting.

Even if your theory is true, any software that causes a load on the GPU can do this. Not specificaly this game. He just happened to be running the game when his HW failed.

[Jatobi]

Your error is hardware related. It has nothing to do with the game. A quick and simple "thought process" would tell you that if the game was causing these bluescreens, more people than just you (thousands) would have this happen, and it hasn't.

The BSOD you are showing is RAM related, or a hard drive failure. Take ram out, unplug power, hold power button down 30 seconds. Put ram back in and fire it up. Does it boot? If yes, good. If no, check your hard drive.

Boot to memtest and check your memory.

Take all overclocks off. If you're using built in software like MSI, uninstall it. If you recently installed a graphics driver and it started afterwards, nothing you can do if you can't get into safemode.

If HDD checks out (using it on another computer to test the drive) and the ram tests good with memtest, reinstall windows.

If you have multiple boot drives as you stated hooked up to your machine, sometimes they can conflict with the main boot drive and throw bluescreens.

It can be anything, and without having the machine in front of us, NO ONE can diagnose it. It's hardware related.

Take it however you want, I do this for a living. People pay me to fix their computers, and screwups.

[hawkeye]

Originally posted by Battleseed:

Originally posted by hawkeye:

There is, but indirectly.

When a gpu is running under load it draws more power from the psu. If the capacitors in the psu are old or low quality, the ripple on the 12v feed from the psu can start to go pear-shaped. The gpu responds by trying tto draw more power. Vicious circle is the result. The system gets unstable and psu cuts off, driver crashes or bsod, depending on which component fails first.

Windows will have files open which won't be closed correctly = potential corruption = bsod when booting.

Even if your theory is true, any software that causes a load on the GPU can do this. Not specificaly this game. He just happened to be running the game when his HW failed.

That's what indirectly means.

[Battleseed]

Originally posted by hawkeye:

Originally posted by Battleseed:

Even if your theory is true, any software that causes a load on the GPU can do this. Not specificaly this game. He just happened to be running the game when his HW failed.

That's what indirectly means.

Yea I get that. But there are still those that think it is a still a direct cause and effect. Why I spelled it out the way I did. OP seems to at least.

[Isha]

Kids today with their BSOD codes...

In my day we had to diagnose by process of elimination most of the time!

[b4ti1c]

Originally posted by Noeat:

Originally posted by batilc:

To all of you guys thinking a physical hardware failure, I have another disk with Mavericks installed, and another one with Win7 installed. These disks boot up fine.

rofl..
dude..
pls..
i understand, u dont have any idea about hardware and issue with win and BSOD..
its ok.. just.. when u dont have any iodea about how your PC work.. use google.. google that error by yourself.. read info..
maybe that info from MS is from ppl who know what they say, cause its their job

and ye, my job is now simmilar.. and i few years work like internal support for some provider.. maybe i have some idea how things works..
this what u wrote here.. is like u wrote: i run KC:D and my dog die.. KC:D kill dogs! BEWARE!
just.. please.. use info what u can find and what we give u..

A couple of things to clear:

- I did not post this to whine, I am already executing my own solution right now. I hope I don't need to re-install win10 as everybody suggests, this chkdsk process took time already more than a clean installation.
- I usually run software that is much more stressing on hardware than this game, for much longer times.
- I believe that some bug in the game caused GPU driver to break the win10 kernel. So I tried to be specific in my action descriptions.
- I, in no way, do NOT believe that this kernel panic is NOT related to KC:D. On the contrary, it is directly related to running KC:D. Maybe it is not a direct bug, maybe it is an os-level bug triggered by a sequence in KC:D. I do not know, so I posted it.

Now to you friend, I am not offended and I do not want to offend you as well; after all you are trying to help and thank you for that.

But, how do you know that I have no idea what I am talking about?
Are you suggesting that my SSD broke down? I, too, suspect this but I highly doubt it. Will see in a day or two.
And why do you think that I did not google any of this stuff? I wrote that I have been grinding google for the past 4 hours.

I just wrote here to let you guys now. This is one of the most buggy games I have played since Vampire The Masquerade. So, if any edge-case extreme-scenario crashes were to happen; they would happen on games like these, no surprise there.