Solved Random crash with vertical bars / solid color?

[Ophaq]

This is a fairly recent problem that has started happening since about 12 days ago. My PC crashes randomly, usually while watching videos or rarely when gaming. The issue looks like a solid color on screen of whatever the screen was displaying with a bunch of vertical bars in similar shades. The audio tends to "hang" in typical BSOD/crashing fashion with the VRRRR noise. It also once happened where I was trying to do a hard reset on my PC by holding the power button, then the bars went away and the PC said the video driver crashed and managed to restart. But then the PC shut down since I had pressed the power button and when it restarted, the PC immediately got the crash as soon as it started up.



I have played Genshin Impact recently 12 hours straight for a couple days and no crash has happened, although I have crashed once while playing it too (this was before I did a clean reinstall of GPU drivers). It happens most often though when I am watching a streamtape or other video player and even on YouTube.



I have tried cleaning and updating my GPU driver by using the AMD cleanup utility and reinstalled the latest beta drive to see if that would fix it. It seemed to work for a while but this issue is random so it might not be the video driver.


I've monitored HW monitor too and it's not an overheating problem. Temps ranged from 35C idle to 60/68C ingame.



I just recently used DDU before posting this to do a clean in safe mode as well and reinstalled an AMD driver the version below the beta which was the recommended version.


The reason why I am posting this is to get help on whether this is a software related issue or not. I am going to take a wild guess as it might be a random service in the background that's triggering it or a network related issue, but that's just what I think. I am plugged directly into my modem via cable so it might be something else.


Attached below is the recommended dxdiag file and an event viewer log. Please let me know what the problem could be, because I'm clueless if it isn't my GPU driver or if it is actually hardware related. If it's hardware related them I'm outta luck. My PC is 10 years old so it could be showing its wear. But if this is software related and fixable, then I can get more time out of this PC before I need to get a new one.


I will let you know if I crash again from this new reinstallation of my GPU drivers. Hoping DDU fixed it but it can be hard to tell with this kind of issue.




EDIT: 10/10/2020 2:10PM - It did it again. The screen had a bunch of green squares all over the place first and then went to bar mode. If I hold the power button / press it instead of hard resetting it, the monitor turns black and flashes off. Then the driver says it recovers with the bars disappearing before shutting down normally. When it turned back on, the PC immediately barred up again. Then hard reset it and I turned it on again and everything is normal for now.


EDIT 10/10/2020 10:47PM -It happened and I tried holding my power button down / pressing it to turn off. The screen went black and the bars disappeared and windows tried to shut itself down. But funny enough, there was an application I had running that didn't want to close and the dialogue box needed to be manually clicked before the computer would shut down. I pressed cancel and the PC went back to before it was before the bars happened. I am going to try and wipe my driver again and use an old driver version before this problem occurred to see if that fixes it.


10/10/2020 11:26PM - Tried old driver 20.2.2 after using DDU in safe mode. Got a checker board pattern in this image: Image on Imgur


When I restarted after the update, the screen barred up 5 mins later. I waited and screen went black as the pc kept trying to restart the display driver which continuously crashed until I manually had to reset. Going back to newest driver for now. I am thinking this might be a hardware failure for my gpu but not completely sure. The driver crashing thing feels more of a software thing or OS thing. No clue.


10/10/2020 11:49PM - The screen made some green artifacts speckled all over and then the screen barred up. I waited 1 minute and the screen flickered off and then resumed normal function. Starting to think this might be a dead GPU?

 

[wither 2]

Off hand, does it do that if you pull the gpu?

Have you run SFC /Scannow from a command prompt with administrator rights?

 

[Ophaq]

I've ran SFW /Scannow in admin cmd and it didn't come up with anything to fix... like the mostly useless command it is lol.


As for pulling the GPU, I haven't done that yet. But when I had uninstalled the graphics driver in safe mode with DDU and restarting the PC to normal mode with no graphics driver installed, and then installing said graphics driver, it came up with artifacting / horizontal line that image I posted.


The PC was ready to restart to have the graphics driver work so unless I'm mistaking at that time wouldn't the PC be using integrated graphics until the PC restarted to use the freshly installed GPU driver?


To me the strangest thing is that it occurs randomly and it won't do any artifacting or barred line screen while I'm in a demanding game except once. When the issue occurs and I power off the PC and it restarts, it has a really high chance of happening again right on startup or 5 mins or so after startup too. This leads me to suspect something software related like I've iterated.


But the only things that might be a cause that I can think of around the time the issue started happening are:
- MBAM updated recently (but I can't remember if it was happening around this time)
- Before this started happening I uninstalled an old version of Spybot Search & Destroy cause I never used it and was tired of closing it in my hidden icon tray. Perhaps it left changes to the registry? I didn't use any uninstaller programs I've seen where they mention a "complete clean" of a program. Not sure if an old uninstalled program would be the cause of a graphical issue though.
- I changed my DNS to 1.1.1.1 ... Strangely enough the issue happened around the time I did this but it could be complete coincidence. I changed my DNS back to default since the issue first happened. I don't have any idea if the issue is network related or if that's even possible with an issue like this.

 

[wither 2]

SFC is a useful tool.

I asked about it since the event log indicates that ntdll.dll is the fault module for every kreshin crash.

I'm just a user like yourself. No real expertise other than seat of the pants experience.

Are you using Firefox?

 

[Ophaq]

Hmm strange it wouldn't come up with anything for ntdll. I've read SFC to be pretty useless most of the time because it usually doesn't fix things. But when it actually finds something it's useful lol.


Yep I'm using firefox.

 

[wither 2]

SFC does usually fix most things but there are occasional things it won't\can't fix.

There was a problem with Firefox in that it would periodically crash the graphics card and then recover it a few minutes later. It was supposedly fixed in an update. You might try temporarily using a different browser.

 

[Ophaq]

Can't be the browser. I have had it opened in the background while gaming and the PC hasn't crashed before while doing so. I have also had the bar issue right on startup before Firefox was even opened.

 

[Snick]

Ophaq

Have you heard of SFCFix.exe by Niemiro

Snick

 

[wither 2]

Can't be the browser. I have had it opened in the background while gaming and the PC hasn't crashed before while doing so. I have also had the bar issue right on startup before Firefox was even opened.

I don't think your video card driver is operating either at startup.

 

[Ophaq]

It should when it disays the desktop. Also never heard of sfcfix. Is it worth using that?

 

[Snick]

Also never heard of sfcfix. Is it worth using that?

Did you peruse the link I provided? No
Richard Burgess (Niemiro) is the author & a Window Update Expert.
Yes, it performs many other functions besides SFC issues.
There are several script functions it performs, including but not limited to, replacing winsxs corruptions/ zero manifests, etc.
If you only run SFCFix.exe it will check or CBS and CBS persist logs for errors which is also done by System Update Readiness Tool by Microsoft. Much smaller download that SURT, not quite as much detail however.

View attachment 412611

Snick

 

[Ophaq]

Thanks Snick, I'll take a look and run it and get back to you on the results.

 

[Ophaq]

Just ran it and the results came up with 0 detections on any corruptions.

 

[Ophaq]

Just happened again while I was in game. I waited a minute and audio was playing fine while the screen was barred. The monitor turned off and on as the display driver reset itself and swapped to my browser window with no cursor. I alt tabbed back to the game to get the cursor back but the game hasn't showed up so I end up needing to close out of it.



Then when I went to my Discord, it said new audio device that's related to AMD. In my icon tray, when I hover over the up arrow or any of the icons in it, instead of showing the name of the application it shows a bright red box with lines and dots in place of the letters. It actually replaced any hover over text boxes with those bright red box and garbled letters.


It looks like this: red box - Image on Pasteboard




EDIT: I tried disabling AMD HD audio driver in my device manager to see if it's a conflict with with my VIA / onboard mobo audio driver. I read some forum posts in different places and there have been similar crashes related to audio drivers. I don't use the AMD audio driver anyway and if it still crashes despite being disabled in device manager, I'll do a DDU cleaning of the driver and then reinstall the GPU driver without the audio driver. If this doesn't work then I'm clueless.


EDIT 2: Still barred up with AMD HD audio driver disabled in device manager. The audio was still playing and when I left it to see if it would restart the video driver, the system actually crashed with audio lag so I had to manually reboot.

 

[wither 2]

Yes, but you're saying the problem is occurring at startup as well as after you've done the startup.

I would still try using another browser for a while. The message about the video driver crashing and then being recovered is what it says after Firefox has caused a crash. I was getting the same thing with Firefox and the crashes were completely random. However, I didn't have to reboot after the recovery.

 

[Ophaq]

Firefox.exe isn't even open at the startup so it can't be Firefox. The only applications that I know of opened on startup are MBAM, Discord, Radeon Software, VIA HD Audio Deck, Bluetooth Devices, Intel Rapid Storage Technology, and Windows Update.

 

[Ophaq]

While I was just browsing Amazon my PC screen turned solid white. I waited and the display driver crashed and reset itself.

 

[Ophaq]

When I went to shut down my pc today before leaving for work, the driver crash had caused this error message before the pc shut down: Error - Album on Imgur


EDIT: Just tried cleaning with DDU in safe mode, rebooting and running the most recent WHQL version of AMD driver. Ran the setup but cancelled out after it extracted the AMD folder. Went to the AMD folder and ran the cleanup utility in it in safe mode. Rebooted and went to device manager and manually selected the AMD driver folder to install just the driver only without the bloat software. Going to cross my fingers and see if this will work.


EDIT 2: Didn't work. Got a solid color gray screen after alt tabbing out. I'm starting to think my gpu is dying. I don't have an alternate display or card to test with either.

 

[Ophaq]

So I've had no problems for a few days. I recently reseated my GPU and memory sticks and dusted out my very dusty computer. However, I just got the issue again today and it gave me an amdkmag.sys BSOD. The screen initially barred up and the audio was still playing fine while I was gaming. I waited a minute listening to my music and then the screen went black. It tried to restart the monitor and refresh what was displaying on the screen but the screen was black with the windows circle loading icon. The BSOD occured after that with no audio playing.


I attached the crash report file below.

 

[wither 2]

Based on the BSOD bug check code, this is Microsoft's explanation (in part) on what is happening-

The GPU is taking more time than permitted to display graphics to your monitor. This behavior can occur for one or more of the following reasons:
You may need to install the latest updates for your display driver, so that it properly supports the TDR process.
Hardware issues that impact the ability of the video card to operate properly, including:
Over-clocked components, such as the motherboard
Incorrect component compatibility and settings (especially memory configuration and timings)
Insufficient system cooling
Insufficient system power
Defective parts (memory modules, motherboards, etc.)
Visual effects, or too many programs running in the background may be slowing your PC down so that the video card can not respond as necessary.