Question Lenovo Legion 5P regularly bluescreening and restarting, even after Factory Reset

[Theo Johnson]

Hi,

I've had this Lenovo Legion 5P since January 2021, and in the last couple of months it's started having issues. Since buying it new, I have added a SanDisk 500GB SSD in the D: Drive slot and an additional 8GB or Samsung RAM.

It regularly has Blue Screen crashes, with a variety of different error messages (the most common is IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL). After these crashes, it restarts and works fine again until the next one.

Sometimes, there is crash screen at all. Instead, it simply shuts off instantly and restarts. Again, it will then be fine for a while until the next crash. These restarts seem to happen at any time - while gaming, browsing, or while it's not in use at all but switched on and left idle.

After a bit of googling, it sounded like IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL is often driver-related, so I did a full factory reset and reinstalled everything from scratch, making sure to update all drivers and get driver control programs e.g. NVIDIA Control Panel.

It wasn't long, though, before the crashes started up again.

This makes me think it's something hardware-related, rather than a software issue. I did notice that often, when the laptop restarted the D: drive would be missing from the list of drives, and after another crash or restart it would reappear. I tried removing the second SSD I had added, but the crashes are still happening.

I would think the next step is to start testing other components to find the cause of the issue, but I'm not really sure where to start? Is there some recommended software for checking RAM, SSDs, motherboards etc. for errors?

The laptop is now out of warranty with Lenovo, but it's possible to restart the warranty for a fee of £60 for the year, so I'm wondering if it might be worth doing that to get it fixed?

Really appreciate any help you can offer!

 

[Lutfij]

I have added a SanDisk 500GB SSD in the D: Drive slot and an additional 8GB or Samsung RAM.
Prior to when you replaced the secondary drive, did you check and see that there were no partitions on the secondary drive that might be of importance to the OS? Also, did you source an identical stick of ram to upgrade what you had out of the box?

Did you also check and see if your laptop's pending any BIOS updates?

so I did a full factory reset
I'd have formatted and reinstalled the OS., with only one of the SSD's installed on your laptop that you intend to install the OS on.

 

[Theo Johnson]

Thanks so much for the reply!

The laptop only came with a single 500GB SSD in the first slot, the second slot was empty. The SSD that was already present in the first slot had no partitions.

The second stick of RAM isn't identical but I took great care to make sure it matched, ordering from Mr Memory using my exact laptop model number and confirming on Reddit that the stick they were planning to send was appropriate for my laptop.

Both of these components were added within the first couple of months of having the laptop, and it worked fine for a long time after installing them. The crashes only started in the last few months.

I haven't checked for BIOS updates - how would I do that?

Today, it's been especially bad, I've had about 6 or 7 crashes/restarts, some within 5 or 10 minutes of each other. A few had blue screens, but not all. Those that did had a PAGE FAULT IN NON PAGED AREA error and what I think was BAD_SYSTEM_CONFIG_INFO (I wasn't using the laptop and only saw it for a split second as it restarted)


As for formatting, I've actually been having some weird Windows Security threat detected popups (doubt it's related as these just started today but the crashes have been happening for ages). So, I'll try formatting anyway to kill two birds with one stone. I'll report back if the crashes continue.

I have added a SanDisk 500GB SSD in the D: Drive slot and an additional 8GB or Samsung RAM.
Prior to when you replaced the secondary drive, did you check and see that there were no partitions on the secondary drive that might be of importance to the OS? Also, did you source an identical stick of ram to upgrade what you had out of the box?

Did you also check and see if your laptop's pending any BIOS updates?

so I did a full factory reset
I'd have formatted and reinstalled the OS., with only one of the SSD's installed on your laptop that you intend to install the OS on.

 

[Theo Johnson]

Actually, thinking about it I'm not sure I have the means to reinstall Windows after formatting the C: drive - I don't have access to a USB drive or CD currently...

 

[Lutfij]

Remove the stick of ram that you added on, see if the issue goes away.

 

[Theo Johnson]

Remove the stick of ram that you added on, see if the issue goes away.

I just removed it, and the added SSD is still out of the laptop, so it's now back to factory hardware as it was when I bought it. I thought I'd have to wait a while to report back, but nope, an instant crash about 10 seconds after booting it back up!

This time, there was a blue screen. The error was DRIVER IRQL_LESS_OR_NOT_EQUAL, and under 'What failed:' it said dxgkrnl.sys

 

[Lutfij]

Replace the stick of ram you'd removed and you really do need to reinstall that OS...source(borrow) an 8GB/16GB thumb drive and create a bootable installer for your OS using Windows Media Creation Tools.

 

[Theo Johnson]

Replace the stick of ram you'd removed and you really do need to reinstall that OS...source(borrow) a 8GB/16GB thumb drive and create a bootable installer for your OS using Windows Media Creation Tools.

I've ordered a USB drive and will do that as soon as it arrives. I'll update if the errors continue afterwards. Thanks for your help, I really appreciate you walking me through this. It's such an amazing, selfless service that people like you provide on these forums!

 

[Theo Johnson]

Replace the stick of ram you'd removed and you really do need to reinstall that OS...source(borrow) an 8GB/16GB thumb drive and create a bootable installer for your OS using Windows Media Creation Tools.

Hi, took a minute but I've just formatted, deleted all partitions and reinstalled Windows 11 using the USB I created with the Media Creation Tools. The laptop seemed fine for the first hour or so of use, but I just got another crash. This time it looked like a Blue Screen but the background was black, and it said HYPERVISOR_ERROR

I haven't seen that message before - it was most often DRIVER IRQL_LESS_OR_NOT_EQUAL or KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED

 

[Theo Johnson]

Hi, took a minute but I've just formatted, deleted all partitions and reinstalled Windows 11 using the USB I created with the Media Creation Tools. The laptop seemed fine for the first hour or so of use, but I just got another crash. This time it looked like a Blue Screen but the background was black, and it said HYPERVISOR_ERROR

I haven't seen that message before - it was most often DRIVER IRQL_LESS_OR_NOT_EQUAL or KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED

And just had another one, both times were 5-10 minutes after starting up a game. Same again - bluescreen layout and sad face emoji but with a black background. This time the error was MEMORY_MANAGEMENT

 

[Theo Johnson]

Had another couple of crashes with no blue screen, just locked up with sound locking where it was making a loud, deafening note, then forced restart.

Also had another crash with a normal blue screen with blue background and HYPERVISOR_ERROR

I've now tried isolating both sticks of RAM with no change, so the last removable component I can try is the SSD. Until now I've just had the OEM one in with my added one removed.

I've just removed the OEM SSD and put my added SanDisk one into the second SSD slot and reinstalled Windows to that using the USB stick.

It seemed fine for about 30 minutes, but I just had another crash. This time no error, just a forced restart. Weirdly, when it restarted it didn't seem able to find the Windows installation and after the Lenovo screen was searching for boot media and displayed an error as if no boot device was found. Restarted and I'm back in again...

 

[Theo Johnson]

Another crash on the new Windows install on the second SSD - BSoD with black background, error was KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED

Again had the weird behaviour where on restart it failed to boot - error says 'Setup Confirmation: EFI PXE 0 for IPv4 (54-05-DB-7A-69-AD) boot failed.)

This part is new since installing windows on the second SSD