[SOLVED] IRQL-not-less-or-equal is ruining my entire week and now PC will not boot. Please help.

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Jun 27, 2021
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Hello. I’m running an AMD system with windows 10 pro. Over the past month or two I had been experiencing blue screens that I’d never experienced before. Stuff about IRQL-not-less-or-equal and occasional program crashes. Annoying but nothing too serious, because it only happened every now and then.

Specs:
  • CPU: Ryzen 5 3600
  • GPU: Radeon Rx 5700
  • MB: MSI B450 Tomahawk
  • RAM: 16GB 3200mhz sticks I’m swapping around trying to make work.
However, last week the blue screens sped up drastically. It went from one BSOD every few hours when system was idle to a BSOD every hour regardless of activity, to a BSOD every 20 minutes, the BSOD every 5 minutes without fail. Finally I ran disk repair, and the crash occurred in the middle of the process, corrupting my windows and making it refuse to boot.

I have flashed bios and upgraded to the latest version for my motherboard, that didn’t fix anything at all.

I have bought all new ram, I have changed every setting in the bios, I have replaced the hard drive with a new SSD, and I can’t get windows to boot for more than 4 minutes without a crash. This has completely taken over my week and the process is absolutely agonizing.

I have taken photos of the screens I’ve encountered, collected them like Pokémon. I cannot retrieve dump files because windows won’t even install now, let alone boot into safe mode.

Also memtest returned Good.

Can anybody make sense of these screens? Make a connection nobody else on the web seems to have done?
I’m on my last legs and I just want my computer back.


Here is an album of all bluescreens I have received.
View: https://imgur.com/a/v35wEpu


These are the screens I’ve experienced over the past week. All I get now after swapping everything out is watchdog screens and IRQL. I got a “pointer” bluescreen after using DDU to attempt to fresh install video drives an hour or so ago. The PC will, once again, not boot. Please, I beg of anyone out there, if you can help me figure out which part is broken I will be supremely thankful.
 
Solution
Every one of those posted errors point to either memory, memory slots, memory controller/CPU or some combination of the three.

Download memtest86 (https://www.memtest86.com/memtest86.html) and run no less than 10 passes on each stick of RAM individually in each memory slot, followed by both sticks together swapping between slots after each round. This will take considerable time, do not skimp. The only acceptable result after those tests is zero (0) errors. Even a single error is a fail.

And, make doubly sure that all of your testing takes place with absolutely no over/under clocking engaged and all voltages at default.
Jun 27, 2021
7
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When I first started having the issue, windows updated stopped functioning. The program simply said “your device is out of date” and wouldn’t provide any further info. Restarting did not fix it, nor didn’t manually installing updates.

I attempted a fresh install of windows. Windows was on its own drive, so besides the lost temp files I have to work around this isn’t a difficult process for me.

Later on when the problem continued to occur, i scanned my device with malwarbytes, hitman, and defender to rule out malware. I also scanned using sfc and chkdsk, as well as performed a memtest. All checked out good.

The problem worsened over a few days of inaction, so I updated my bios. That seemed to stave it off for a few hours, but it returned almost immediately.

Next day, the crashes were absolutely intolerable. Google chrome pages would crash consistently, and the pc would BSOD every few minutes. I ran a chkdsk on C: and it found something to repair. In the middle of the process, BSOD crashed the PC. Blackscreened. That point on windows wouldn’t boot until I got a new SSD to install it on the next day. The media creation tool crashed repeatedly.

Today I replaced the RAM, and after set up there has been no change to the crashing. Windows allowed me to use the new install for a few hours to set everything up. But upon trying to install MSI’s recommended drivers, it crashed again refuses to boot to windows. I have full access to bios still.

And that’s where I’m at right now. I hope this helps a little bit.
 
Jun 27, 2021
7
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I have replaced my power supply, and still no dice. Crashed on windows installation process.

I’m giving up hope that this point. I can’t find the issue, and all other posts I read seem to have wildly different answers to my problem.

I can’t afford a new CPU or the like, god forbid a GPU in today’s market.
 
Every one of those posted errors point to either memory, memory slots, memory controller/CPU or some combination of the three.

Download memtest86 (https://www.memtest86.com/memtest86.html) and run no less than 10 passes on each stick of RAM individually in each memory slot, followed by both sticks together swapping between slots after each round. This will take considerable time, do not skimp. The only acceptable result after those tests is zero (0) errors. Even a single error is a fail.

And, make doubly sure that all of your testing takes place with absolutely no over/under clocking engaged and all voltages at default.
 
Solution
Jun 27, 2021
7
0
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Update. I went ahead and purchased a new motherboard, as all signs have pointed towards that.

However, bluescreens are still appearing

system-service-exception is the most common one I’ve seen so far.

As I was reinstalling windows and typing this, DPC-Watchdog BSOD appeared again.
Is the CPU the culprit? The gpu? I’m terrified, to be honest. Is overclocking on my CPU incorrect? Is my cpu damaged? I can’t tell.
 
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