Aug 18, 2019
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Hey all,

This one's got me stumped. I'm not doing anything particularly unusual on my relatively new MSI GS65 Stealth (Windows 10; SSD)—running Chrome, Autodesk Maya, not much else. I'd accidentally turned on grayscale rendering (Ctrl-Win-C, I think) and was trying to resolve it when I got my first BSOD on this machine.

I'm stuck in a BSOD loop that attempts to Prepare Automatic Repair, but it'll BSOD after a few seconds and drop me on the Aptio Setup Utility (BIOS manager). I'm unable to enter System Recovery (spamming F3 for MSI or F8), and changing boot priority to boot from my recovery drive doesn't do anything.

Also, the BIOS manager Recovery screen shows the message, "ROM Image is not loaded | ROM Image update denied", with no actions to take. After selecting Load Optimized Defaults, the Recovery screen gives me a new message that states, "ROM Layout mismatch detected | Partial update is not allowed", with the option to "Proceed with flash update", but this also seems to do nothing.

Here's a list of BSOD stop codes I've received:
  • IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL
  • SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED (What Failed: CI.dll)
  • DRIVER_PNP_WATCHDOG
  • PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA
  • KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED (What Failed: FLTMGR.SYS)
  • UNEXPECTED_KERNAL_MODE_TRAP
  • 0xc000021a
  • FAT_FILE_SYSTEM
  • DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE (after a lengthy time on the MSI boot screen)
  • MEMORY_MANAGEMENT
  • REFS_FILE_SYSTEM
Any ideas on how to launch System Recovery/break the BSOD loop? After that, what should I do to identify and fix the root problem? It all feels out-of-the-blue, so I'm not sure if it's as benign as an outdated driver or as bad as a failed SSD.

Thanks!
 
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