There is nothing more heart-breaking than getting a steady round of BSODs whilst you are hoping to spend some time gaming. An evening of gaming turns into a much less fun evening of poking around on internet forums and playing around with the drivers and trouble-shooters to try and figure out what the hell is causing the problem... hopefully something that is easy to fix and that isn't too disruptive to the way that the computer is already set up.

So, I had an unfortunate batch of the BSODs on the gaming laptop last weekend. It was pretty regular when I was playing Far Cry 5... but it seemed to not be a problem when trying out Mechwarrior 5 and RimWorld. However, more disturbingly, after the dreaded blue screen, there were a couple of moments when the machine wouldn't reboot at all and would get stuck on a black screen with "No bootable drive detected". Not good... that could be a Windows boot corruption, or a SSD going bad. Neither of which would be much fun to fix... one would be a fresh install of Windows and the second would be a new SSD and then a new install. Both of which would mean that it would be a pain in the arse to restore all the games and programs back to the same state.

However, at this point, I was still thinking that it could be a Far Cry 5 problem with a driver... unfortunately, the BSOD message would flash by pretty damn fast and I hadn't set up a program to capture the error log yet. Plus, there was the potential that it was being caused by some conflict thanks to the buggy roll out of the PrintNightmare patch. So, given that I wasn't going to roll back the critical security patch, I was first counting on the hope that it was just a Far Cry 5 problem... no biggie, I have a million other games that I should also play!

Sadly, the same thing started to happen with MechWarrior 5... and then soon afterwards, just on the desktop as well. So, it was definitely something that was to do with either hardware or OS. Given that then XMG Fusion has its own driver download pages, I figured I should probably start getting all of those and updating them. Drivers are often the cause of problems, and updated drivers can fix most things...

But sadly, that wasn't it... and I wasn't game enough to try out a BIOS update whilst the machine was so unstable. After trawling around the XMG forums (they have a great after market support and community), I came across this odd post that had similar symptoms to mine. In it, the poster described having fixed it by reseating the SSDs! Apparently, they had gotten loose and this was the cause of all the problems... BSODs and undetectable drives. Weird... but possible, and most importantly a quick and easy fix if true!

So, using the trusty iFixit toolkit... I hijacked some of the LEGO attic space to break open the back of the XMG Fusion. Something that I really treasure about the XMG laptops is the easy access to all the internals, which makes for easy maintenance and upgrades! The last time I cracked this open, it was to add in an extra 1TB SSD that I picked up on a sale.

I probably should do a repaste at some point, but it is only a year old... so, not really pressing at the moment. So, maybe n=the next time will just be a RAM boost or something... however, while I had the machine open, I took the chance to double check the battery and also dust out the fans a little bit.... not much there, but it doesn't hurt.

So... the potential culprits. The top one is the NVMe SSD that has the OS install on it... and so it would be the problematic one if it was the case. It didn't seem loose, but I pulled it out and reseated it again... and did the same with the slower SATA drive that I use for storage. Hmm... I wonder what 2 or 4 TB capacity drives cost these days....

Anyway, so far, I've had three days of flawless operations... including with Far Cry 5... so, I'm starting to feel hopeful that this was just a mechanical reseating issue and not something where I have to replace the SSD or reinstall Windows due to a corrupt boot file.

YIPPEEE!!!!!

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