Question System BSOD'd with Memory Management error ?

[Dadrian Daedalus]

I have a system with the following config:

CPU: i5 9400F
Motherboard: Asus b365 strix
Ram: Corsair 8gb *2
GPU: Zotac 3060ti
PSU: Corsair RM 750e
128 GB SATA SSD (Boot drive)
2TB+1tb HDDs
OS: Win 11 pro

Today when i was playing a game it suddenly BSOD'd and then restarted.After restarting however,it couldn't boot into windows and was stuck in the windows loading screen (with the spinning circle).

After waiting for sometime,i manually restarted the pc,then it said it was about to run diagnostics on the drive-once it was done,the pc restarted automatically but was stuck in the dreaded windows loading screen yet again!

Then i removed the SSD and tested it on another working pc-the SSD appeared to be ok(Crystal disk info displayed its status as "Good").Then i analyzed the crash dumps on it using an utility called Whocrashed,which reported that the system had crashed with the error code "Memory management" and suggested that it was either caused by a software problem/memory corruption or overheating.

I am quite baffled as to what to make of this bizarre issue-preliminary research on google indicated that this memory management issue is typically associated with faulty RAM.

So how do i determine what caused my pc to crash?And why did the crash make my PC unbootable? I've had crashes on other pcs before but was able to reboot into windows normally upon restarting.

This is the first time i am experiencing something like this.Please advice what i should do to resolve it.

 

[gardenman]

WhoCrashed can sometimes point directly to a driver, but it doesn't help most of the time. It reads dump files, which are located in C:\windows\minidump Upload those dump files to a file sharing site like Google Drive or OneDrive and be sure they can be downloaded by anyone (no passwords required). Multiple minidumps are better than one.

Someone here in the forums will hopefully download them, analyze them, and might be able to better help you.

A drive can be labeled as "good", yet still have corrupted files on it which prevent you from booting correctly. And no hardware tests are ever perfect.

If you want to be proactive, go ahead and download memtest86, write it to a flash drive, boot to the flash drive, run it for at least 4 passes to check your RAM. This will take hours. More info here: https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/how-to-test-your-ram.3691373/

 

[Dadrian Daedalus]

I checked those dump files with another utility called bluescreenview,it reported that the crash was caused by ntoskrnel.exe- what could that mean?

Can such memory management errors be caused by bad video card drivers?I had recently updated my nvidia driver to version 551.86 (the latest one)-could that have caused the crash?

I am running memtest right now,its on the 2nd pass but still haven't detected any errors.If it finishes without errors,can we conclude that the ram modules are ok?

Here's the link to the dump file in question:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1IgLF0pIDL09nddTMAKrQZxrg6N5GKG4U?usp=sharing

Would be great if someone could analyze it and point out the most likely cause of this error.

 

[gardenman]

ntoskrnel.exe is the Windows NT Kernel, which is basically Windows itself. It is not the issue.

Personally I would go into Device Manager, find the GPU driver, go to Properties and choose to "Roll back" to the previous driver. Maybe it will help... maybe.

Both WhoCrashed and BlueScreenView cannot do the in-depth dump analyisis that is required to help you. On rare ocassions, they will show a driver name which can then be updated and fix the issue. Most of the time they cannot help much.

Memtest is like all other hardware tests, it's not perfect. Does it mean your RAM is OK if you finish 4 passes without any errors? No, it just helps to rule out RAM as being the likely issue. Any errors from memtest mean you have RAM issues. If you have multiple modules (you said "8gb *2") and receive any errors, test them one a time to determine which one is causing issues.

Wait for someone to analyze the dump files. They may be able to pull more info out the dumps, but even that is not guaranteed.

 

[Dadrian Daedalus]

Memtest didn't find any errors.Now waiting for an in-depth analysis of the crash dumps seems like the only way to identify the root cause of the problem.

 

[ubuysa]

I would look at the system drive because according to the dump this was a page-in problem from the paging file...

MEMORY_MANAGEMENT (1a)
    # Any other values for parameter 1 must be individually examined.
Arguments:
Arg1: 000000000000003f, An inpage operation failed with a CRC error. Parameter 2 contains
    the pagefile offset. Parameter 3 contains the page CRC value.
    Parameter 4 contains the expected CRC value.
Arg2: 00000000000d0ed1
Arg3: 0000000008df6a7a
Arg4: 000000003a0eb40f

And also...

ADDITIONAL_DEBUG_TEXT:  Memory Manager detected corruption of a pagefile page while performing an in-page operation.
The data read from storage does not match the original data written.
This indicates the data was corrupted by the storage stack, or device hardware.

If it's not the system drive (or whichever drive holds the pagefile) then it's RAM. However, the CRC failure indicated strongly points to the drive.

 

[Dadrian Daedalus]

Thanks for the in depth analysis. Yesterday i swapped the sata ssd(system drive) with an alternate one and reinstalled windows, so far no crashes yet.

While i was checking the connection of the storage devices to the motherboard 's sata ports, i observed something weird-some of the ports seem to have become wobbly/loose and were slightly tilting while plugging/unplugging sata cables. I think the ssd was connected to one of these ports earlier.

Is it normal for sata ports to exhibit such wobbling during use? Or is my motherboard defective? Could bad sata ports cause bsods? However all devices plugged even to those wobbly ports are showing up in windows. Is there any way to fix these malfunctioning ports? Unfortunately the motherboard is no longer in warranty - its exact model is Asus strix b365 g gaming.

 

[ubuysa]

Do you mean that SATA cable connectors are loose in the ports or that the ports are loose on the board? A loose cable connector isn't uncommon, it's wise to use quality SATA cables to avoid this kind of thing. Loose ports on the board is a board problem.

Bad SATA ports certainly can cause BSODs. A BSOD occurs whenever a kernel-mode function encounters an unrecoverable error.