Intel SSD causing BSOD 0x50 on ANY Win computer (USB and SATA)

I've been having very infrequent BSOD over the past year or so, occasionally in Starcraft II, but most often if I accidentally leave my computer on overnight. The issue was infrequent enough (perhaps once per month) that I have ignored it until this current incident. I'm not sure if the current issue is related to BSOD or recent tweaking of AV and/or NVIDIA drivers.

Simultaneously, I have been having off-and-on problems with the NVIDIA GeForce Experience software refusing to connect and download driver updates for my card. Yesterday, when I logged on, the graphics driver had reoccurring crashes, so I decided to try to fix the problem with NV Experience and update graphics drivers. First I deleted NV Experience settings and restarted the NV backend service, but this did not resolve the NV Experience downloading issue. Attempting to uninstall NV Experience with CCleaner made Windows Explorer lag out.

Rebooting and attempting to uninstall NV Experience again, the system still had lagging behaviour in Windows Explorer, and several services stopped including Windows Defender and system volume. I had not used the system for sometime, so I updated my antivirus definitions and ran some system scans (Windows Defender, SpybotSD, MalwareBytes). They did not turn up any issues. After a few more reboot/uninstall attempts, I managed to uninstall NV Experience, but the system crashed completely with BSOD a few minutes after.

After crash, I was able to boot into safe mode after a successful CHKDSK, but system subsequently crashed again after a few more very laggy minutes. Subsequent reboots resulted in immediate BSOD or "Disk Read Error. Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to Restart."



I suspected RAM or disk problems, so I ran memtest as low hanging fruit. After 4 passes, Memtest reported 2 errors on the hammer test, but nothing else, so memory seems to check out.

Attempting to boot from a Win7 install disk resulted in same BSOD, which I thought was very odd. (DVD drive boot confirmed in BIOS). I unplugged all three drives (2 x SSD, 1 x HDD) and the Win install disk booted successfully. Plugging them back in one at a time revealed that the Intel X25-M SSD causes the install disk to BSOD. I pulled out the Intel SSD attempted to connect it with a USB adaptor to another Win 7 PC (already booted up), and this second system IMMEDIATELY bluescreened when the SSD mounted.

Finally, I downloaded Hiren's BootCD and made a USB image. I was not able to mount this on the original system with SSD connected via USB. I was able to boot into Hiren and start up Mini WinXP, but plugging in the SSD causes immediate BSOD here as well. SSD seems to kill ANY windows system immediately on mount attempt.

So what's the best path forward here? I'd like to evaluate the drive before I just wipe it in Linux, but I can't seem to mount it for more than 2 seconds to run an SSD toolkit on it. Can I turn off automount somehow, so I can examine the disk from a working Win system? Should I just chuck the drive in the trash?

Apologies in advanced that I don't have a crash log to post. Obviously since I can't boot the disk at all, I was unable to gather logs!

Thanks for your reply, ICIT2LOL!

I ran MemTest86 V6.3.0 from memtest86.com (not + from memtest.org), which was released this January. The four pass run did run for several hours overnight and completed successfully, save warnings about the vulnerability on the hammer test, which is a known issue in the DDR3 spec AFAIK. Since the SSD is reliably causing BSOD on two systems, independent of installed RAM, it doesn't seem to be a memory problem though.

As I mentioned, I can't set up a memory dump on the original system, because the SSD in question is the boot disk, and I'm unable to boot Windows at all. I can set up logging on our second system, and plug in the SSD externally via USB. I will try that tonight and report back.

Cheers,
BSODDING