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

[b4ti1c]

Originally posted by iB 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.

Maybe the title is misleading. Of course the game is not literally causing the BSOD loop. Game simply wrecked the system sector somehow, and now I cannot boot at all.

To your points:

- No overclocks
- Memory is OK
- HDD appears OK, I booted up using another disk, and then I can read/write big chunks on it without a problem. I even started a little game on MacOS. Right now, I am waiting the result of chkdsk

Why do you think the beginning of this BSOD-loop is not game-related, I dont get that.

I heavy load my GPU 3 consecutive days for deep-learning, nothing happens.
I overwhelm my CPU on video-transcoding for 12 hours, no problem.

It is may be a directx12 related issue, or nvidia-driver issue, or kernel issue, or audio-driver issue, it does not matter. I just state that this corruption is triggered by the game.

Maybe it's one of those times when a one in a million case happens to you. Maybe this is like a super-rare bug that might occur on any directx game, but just by chance, it happened to me on this super-buggy game.

I dont know you guys, but it feels almost the same with Vampire Msqr. Super-fun, super-buggy.

[Einstine]

Reinstall from your image on your bootable usb stick.

[PatientLandBeaver]

To TP, if you think a game/program 'broke' your hardware, you are clearly new to the world of computers. The game simply exposed faulty hardware or conflicts with your PC which will require some knowledge on your part to troubleshoot and fix. Or just send it off to a PC shop and they can do it for you. First step would be to check the ram with Memtest (AGAIN) on bootup (outside of Windows OS). To tests 4,5,6, on a loop for several hours.

[Luan]

it's your hardware dude. I don't even recommend using old mobos with these 10xx nvidia cards, all of them are optimized to be used with ddr4 rams plus 4th gen processor and up

[Einstine]

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.

Best answer. This was caused by a power draw.

[Skycould]

just cuz you havent had issues with BSOD before doesnt mean that the issue that causing it wasnt there before, its simply growns so that it got to a state where it maifunction and causes BSOD, sounds to me that some of your hardware is either Broken or close to breaking (if reinstalling windows doesnt help that is)
when you have a BSOD next time write down the code that shows up and search for that code should be linked to something could be hardware could be driver (if driver reinstalling windows would remove the issue, well unless it repeat itself that is)
if you dont know what to do you could always contact the shop you bought it in or some other place that can help you repair it for you (note can cost alot)

eitherway what i can say 100% its not the game thats to blame for the issue, potensial causes:
1. some part in your computer has either had a mailfunction over time and it reached its limit.

2. windows update went wrong.

3. some filess in windows got damaged during a crash that cased the computer to shut down(or you forced it off as a shortcut once when you had little time)

4. some hardware broken down or reached its loadlimit and took dmg.

+ a potensial fix: 5. you havent cleared the computer for dust (recomend doing so if you havent done so cuz it might just fix your issue, if you dont know how look it up on google or youtube (ofc be carefull dont touch parts and be sure to have mask etc for your own health)

[Struggle Bus]

yeah dude, i think you need to drop a few bucks on a new mobo and cpu. A 6yr old chip and outdated board are not doing you any favors. I am guessing that you have been working up to this for awhile now especially by "overwhelm(ing) my CPU on video-transcoding for 12 hours".

The 3770 is kinda... ancient and I promise you that 1070 you got in there may as well be a 950 with the sort of bottlenecking you have going on at the CPU.

I also have to wonder if your PSU is perhaps comprimised or just not up to the task. Most people don't understand the relationship between PSU output and hardware draw. (not sure why, computers run on electricity, not magic.) This is especially true if DUAL means you have 2 1070's running in SLI (why you would do that with a chip that old is beyond me but whatevs.)

Seriously folks, big expensive GPU's are a big expensive waste of money if you don't upgrade the other parts of your system as well. I know upgrading your video card is fun but there are more considerations than just slappin in a bigger card.

[eniohideカルロス]

The same thing was happening to me, so I remembered that the blues screens start to appear when I bought this new memory, chinese memory, so when the 70th blue screen appeared, i just try to put another memory (that hardware that looks like a comb, a green comb) and now, my computer is not showing blue screen anymore YAY

[SolidSpaceDisk]

kernel problem and then not reboot? This happens to me when I open chrome for a long time occasionally... like 2 times in one month
This is either my SSD or ram problem I guess
go change the boot priority from BIOS to fix it. After the BSOD, the boot priority should change to boot
non-system disk first, which causes the OS cannot be booted. So change the system disk as the first one to boot can fix it.
Edit: And almost forget this, my HDD seemed fine as it can write/load large chunk data but in fact not really because it caused BSOD after I get back to online from broken-ass Internet service and steam trollingly loaded a lot of data into the disk at once. Changed HDD and fixed it. Have you tried to install KCD in that windows 7 disk, get the save from the win 10 disk to win 7 one and run it?

[Apop85]

I only had bsod if my gpu or cpu overheated. I was able to solve it by upgrade cpu fan and edit the fan curve of gpu with evga precision x

[krisvill]

I have an Alienware 17 R4 and I updated my BIOS and now, I cant load up my save game with at least 60 hours of gameplay. Anyone of you have an idea?

[SolidSpaceDisk]

May you describe how it cannot load up(crash to menu?desktop?) so people who have the game can help you?

[krisvill]

When you load a save game, on the bottom right of your screen you see the loading METER. It fills up to 3 oclock. It stay there at least 5 mins with background music then a message Cant Load File

[Essedus]

And this is why I wont use win10.

[Coriolanus]

Hi everyone! Sorry for my english, i have the same problem only with kcd, i have this specs:
I 5 8600k
Msi z370
Ram ddr4
Everithing it’s ok i do this tests
Memetest86
And test for my CPU
AND ALL IS OK
I play for hours with other games power and only with kcd i had blue screen , my sistem is update win 10 and all drivers are ok
I love this game , please help me