[SOLVED] Laptop running into random blue screen crashes ?

[BirdOfParadise]

My laptop has recently been running into lots of blue screen errors. They are different each time and dont really have anything in common. I have tried running basic trouble shooters but have no luck. They pop out of nowhere and they have no correlation with the task im doing at that point in time. I ran the trouble shooter in the bios menu and that says everything is fine except it cannot detect a bootable drive even though one is plugged in and clearly it boots from it temporarily before crashing again. Does anyone know what might be wrong or a solution.
Here are some errors:

Critical process died
wdfilter.sys failed
unexpected storage exception

Thank you

 

[JoshRC]

I find that multiple different errors on blue screens especially when unrelated a to specific program usually indicates a corrupted windows installation or corrupted critical drivers. Either will require a reinstall of windows most of the time. However there are a couple of things I can think of trying first.

Try getting into the bios menu again and finding an option called "reset bios to defaults" choose that and wait for the pc to restart.

Next open command prompt as administrator and type "chkdsk C: /r" without the " " and press enter, let it do its thing and when it says its finished restart the pc, I highly doubt this will work but you can try.

If that doesnt work see if you can get into advanced start up options. This page will show you how: https://www.laptopmag.com/au/articles/windows-10-advanced-startup-options-menu. Navigate to system restore (hopefully you'll have one that was made fairly recently) and restore to that system image. Note that any files or programs installed or edited on the pc between when that restore point was made and now will be lost!

If its crashing so often that you you cant get to that menu, or you dont have a restore point to go back to then I suggest making a bootable windows installation drive on a usb, you can use any modern usb drive thats 16gb or bigger. Get another pc to use and download the windows media creation tool (its a program directly from windows and is completely safe to use as long as you get it from this website: https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/software-download/windows10). Insert the USB, open the tool on the computer and follow its instructions. Once its finished start the problematic pc with the usb drive inserted and open the boot menu (by pressing the f12 key on most pcs however yours maybe different) choose to boot from the USB device. Follow the same"laptopmag" link above for the next part (method 2). Try system restore now, you can also open command prompt from the same menu and try the same command from before (again I doubt this command will actually help).

If none of the helps for you then I suggest a fresh windows install. This will wipe anything and everything off the PC. You can use that USB from before, just boot to it, select your region and language, hit next and you will have the option to automaticly select where to install or custom install, (or something along those lines) choose custom. Next it will show you different drive partitions probably one called "windows" another "system reserved" ect. You will need to select every one of these and click the delete button toward the bottom of the window. The result should be one option that is called "unallocated space" now select this and click next. Windows will install itself, it will take a while so be patient, especially if you have a hard drive instead of an SSD. At some point windows will boot, it will require a bit of configuration on your part but from this point what you choose is up to your preference.

Thats it really, if you have reset the bios to default and have done a fresh install of windows and you are still getting the same issues then the problem is almost certaily hardware related (most likley a dying drive that will need to be replaced). Depending on your skill you maybe able to fix this but if your unsure take it to a professional.

 

[BirdOfParadise]

I find that multiple different errors on blue screens especially when unrelated a to specific program usually indicates a corrupted windows installation or corrupted critical drivers. Either will require a reinstall of windows most of the time. However there are a couple of things I can think of trying first.

Try getting into the bios menu again and finding an option called "reset bios to defaults" choose that and wait for the pc to restart.

Next open command prompt as administrator and type "chkdsk C: /r" without the " " and press enter, let it do its thing and when it says its finished restart the pc, I highly doubt this will work but you can try.

If that doesnt work see if you can get into advanced start up options. This page will show you how: https://www.laptopmag.com/au/articles/windows-10-advanced-startup-options-menu. Navigate to system restore (hopefully you'll have one that was made fairly recently) and restore to that system image. Note that any files or programs installed or edited on the pc between when that restore point was made and now will be lost!

If its crashing so often that you you cant get to that menu, or you dont have a restore point to go back to then I suggest making a bootable windows installation drive on a usb, you can use any modern usb drive thats 16gb or bigger. Get another pc to use and download the windows media creation tool (its a program directly from windows and is completely safe to use as long as you get it from this website: https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/software-download/windows10). Insert the USB, open the tool on the computer and follow its instructions. Once its finished start the problematic pc with the usb drive inserted and open the boot menu (by pressing the f12 key on most pcs however yours maybe different) choose to boot from the USB device. Follow the same"laptopmag" link above for the next part (method 2). Try system restore now, you can also open command prompt from the same menu and try the same command from before (again I doubt this command will actually help).

If none of the helps for you then I suggest a fresh windows install. This will wipe anything and everything off the PC. You can use that USB from before, just boot to it, select your region and language, hit next and you will have the option to automaticly select where to install or custom install, (or something along those lines) choose custom. Next it will show you different drive partitions probably one called "windows" another "system reserved" ect. You will need to select every one of these and click the delete button toward the bottom of the window. The result should be one option that is called "unallocated space" now select this and click next. Windows will install itself, it will take a while so be patient, especially if you have a hard drive instead of an SSD. At some point windows will boot, it will require a bit of configuration on your part but from this point what you choose is up to your preference.

Thats it really, if you have reset the bios to default and have done a fresh install of windows and you are still getting the same issues then the problem is almost certaily hardware related (most likley a dying drive that will need to be replaced). Depending on your skill you maybe able to fix this but if your unsure take it to a professional.

I pasted the chkdsk command into the terminal yet it ony comes with an error
"
C:\WINDOWS\system32>chkdsk C:/r
The type of the file system is NTFS.
Cannot lock current drive.

Chkdsk cannot run because the volume is in use by another
process. Would you like to schedule this volume to be
checked the next time the system restarts? (Y/N)
"
Not sure how to proceed from here. I've typed " y" but when i restart nothing happens.

 

[JoshRC]

Chkdsk cannot run because the volume is in use by another
process. Would you like to schedule this volume to be
checked the next time the system restarts? (Y/N)
"
Not sure how to proceed from here. I've typed " y" but when i restart nothing happens.

So this is to be expected as windows won't allow it to happen while it's running. My bad should have mentioned this.
When you typed 'y' did you also hit the enter key? If you did you should see a message confirming it will run when the computer restarts. If you didn't see that message give it another go and make sure you hit enter.
Also are you sure you are running command prompt as administrator? That requires right clicking on the command promt icon and selecting 'run as admin'.

 

[BirdOfParadise]

The co

So this is to be expected as windows won't allow it to happen while it's running. My bad should have mentioned this.
When you typed 'y' did you also hit the enter key? If you did you should see a message confirming it will run when the computer restarts. If you didn't see that message give it another go and make sure you hit enter.
Also are you sure you are running command prompt as administrator? That requires right clicking on the command promt icon and selecting 'run as admin'.

The command prompt was run as administrator and I managed to get it to scan. It says nothing is wrong with both c and d drives. I also ran Ram troubleshooting as well as some ram workload tests and that also turned out to be fine as well. My only doubt is now left with corrupt os. The blues reen errors also seem to align with this. I'm not sure what I can do beyond this than either restoring or completely reinstalling windows.