Frequent BSOD on wake from sleep in Win 8.1: nvlddmkm.sys (nvidia gtx 780)

[win8bsod]

· OS - Windows 8.1 (x64)
· Custom built desktop, <1yr, original OS installation
· CPU: Intel i5-4670K
· Video Card: GeForce GTX 780
· MotherBoard - Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD3H
· Power Supply - Seasonic 850, bronze

For the past month or so my rig has been blue-screening regularly. Generally happens when I try to wake from suspend, but not all the time. Sometimes it shows the lock screen before crashing, other times there is no screen output whatsoever and pressing the power button again (after pressing once to wake from sleep) kills the PC immediately. I've tried:

• adjusting power options: USB selective suspend, PCI-E link state power management, etc.
• completely uninstalling and re-installing different versions of the Nvidia drivers -- including the most recent (347.25, 1/22/15) and older revisions (current dump is with 337.88, 5/26/14).

I can't run perfmon /report:

[Administrator: Command Prompt]
> perfmon /report

perfmon GUI opens with "Error: An error occured while attempting to generate the report. The operator or administrator has refused the request."

WinDBG isn't super helpful, it's always nvlddmkm.sys but the backtrace doesn't usually include much useful info:

nt!KeBugCheckEx
nt! ?? ::FNODOBFM::`string'+0x240d
nt!_C_specific_handler+0x86
nt!RtlpExecuteHandlerForException+0xd
nt!RtlDispatchException+0x1a5
nt!KiDispatchException+0x646
nt!KiPageFault+0x214
nvlddmkm+0x1af050
nvlddmkm+0x1af30a
...

Other times it's been BAD_POOL_CALLER or SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! I have the .dmp file but it's 1.3GiB.

Thanks! Will run the suggested programs. I've tried debugging myself but I'm more of a Unix guy.

 

[win8bsod]

Driver Verifier chokes on gdrv.sys on boot. I've reconfigured Driver Verifier to check all non-MS drivers except for that one.

gdrv.sys seems to be related to Gigabyte power management. If verifier doesn't catch other drivers (especially nvidia) I'll look into what I can do about the Gigabyte stuff.

 

[Patrick]

gdrv.sys seems to be related to Gigabyte power management. If verifier doesn't catch other drivers (especially nvidia) I'll look into what I can do about the Gigabyte stuff.

Windows Update probably installed the 2008 version of Easy Saver, therefore you have a severely outdated OS>BIOS utility and that's the reason for the crashes. 2008 version, 2014/15 version... all the same to me. I'd just uninstall it and run, all useless bloatware at the end of the day anyway. I can still take a look at the verifier crash dump if you'd like. You can find it in C:\Windows named MEMORY.DMP. Upload that to OneDrive or something similar and paste the link.

 

[win8bsod]

OK, I'll uninstall EasyTune and see what happens. I didn't back up the old MEMORY.dmp so I only have the dump from the Driver Verifier crash -- not sure if that's worth investigating yet since the dumps usually point to Nvidia.

Another symptom: sometimes on waking, the peripherals are responsive but there is no video output. I have to force shutdown. Even changing from HDMI to DP or from my GPU to the motherboard doesn't help.

 

[Patrick]

Like I said, Easy Tune is a BIOS > OS utility. If it's an older version, the kernel-mode driver is buggy and not complying with Windows 8.1 especially, so it's probably having a lot of negative effects. Even at the chance it's not the actual issue, it's worth removing.