Ram issue after installing WSL

Question

⚠️ System shutting down after Windows boot – ROG Strix X470-F DRAM LED blinking

Specs:

Motherboard: ASUS ROG Strix X470-F Gaming (latest BIOS)

Symptoms:

PC boots fine, runs BIOS indefinitely with no issues.

  Once Windows loads, after ~40–60 seconds the monitor goes black, fans keep spinning.

  
     **DRAM Q-LED** starts blinking **yellow**.

     
        No full shutdown or reboot – just black screen and frozen state.

        
           Temperatures normal (CPU/GPU fine).

What happened before the issue:

Installed WSL, Docker, Ubuntu, and Kali Linux.

Enabled SVM Mode (virtualization) in BIOS → Advanced > CPU Configuration.

After that, Windows started crashing.

Disabled SVM and stopped all WSL instances, but issue persisted.

Troubleshooting done so far:

Disabled SVM Mode and IOMMU in BIOS.

Verified temps, PSU, GPU – all normal.

BIOS stable for hours.

Windows still crashes after boot with blinking DRAM LED.

Task Manager still shows “Virtualization: On” even with SVM disabled.

Suspected cause: Windows still running Hyper-V / WSL virtualization layer even though BIOS virtualization is off → causes memory mapping conflict that triggers DRAM LED / system freeze.

⚠️ System shutting down after Windows boot – ROG Strix X470-F DRAM LED blinking

Specs:

Motherboard: ASUS ROG Strix X470-F Gaming (latest BIOS)

Symptoms:

PC boots fine, runs BIOS indefinitely with no issues.

  Once Windows loads, after ~40–60 seconds the monitor goes black, fans keep spinning.

  
     **DRAM Q-LED** starts blinking **yellow**.

     
        No full shutdown or reboot – just black screen and frozen state.

        
           Temperatures normal (CPU/GPU fine).

What happened before the issue:

Installed WSL, Docker, Ubuntu, and Kali Linux.

Enabled SVM Mode (virtualization) in BIOS → Advanced > CPU Configuration.

After that, Windows started crashing.

Disabled SVM and stopped all WSL instances, but issue persisted.

Troubleshooting done so far:

Disabled SVM Mode and IOMMU in BIOS.

Verified temps, PSU, GPU – all normal.

BIOS stable for hours.

Windows still crashes after boot with blinking DRAM LED.

Task Manager still shows “Virtualization: On” even with SVM disabled.

Suspected cause:
Windows still running Hyper-V / WSL virtualization layer even though BIOS virtualization is off → causes memory mapping conflict that triggers DRAM LED / system freeze.

Fix steps (so far):

Disable all Hyper-V/WSL features in Windows Features: Hyper-V, Virtual Machine Platform, Windows Hypervisor Platform, Windows Subsystem for Linux, Containers.

• Ran this in admin CMD (Admin):

bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off
dism.exe /Online /Disable-Feature:Microsoft-Hyper-V

Reference (manual link): ROG Strix X470-F Gaming User Manual – Q-LEDs

Q-LED meanings:

 DRAM (yellow) – memory detection error / instability

 
    CPU (red) – CPU not detected / power issue

    
       VGA (white) – GPU not detected

       
          BOOT (green) – boot device not found

Goal: Confirm whether virtualization layers in Windows can trigger DRAM LED blinking / black screen on the X470-F, and whether anyone else has seen similar behavior after enabling WSL or Hyper-V.

Moved from System Center Virtual Machine Manager

Answer 1

Hi zoinx95,
Welcome to Microsoft Q&A forum. I'm happy to help.

I will list some suggestions and notes you may try with your situation.

1. UMA Buffer
   First, you need to enter BIOS to re-enable SVM and IOMMU, then look for UMA Buffer and set it to Auto. 1G or 2G may also work.
2. XMP Profile
   If you set XMP Profile in your BIOS, give it a try by disabling XMP to get more stable memory. Please make sure your RAM and CPU Memory controller can handle the XMP profile before enabling it.
3. Fast boot
   Commonly, turning off SVM should get you to the system but it's not in your case. You may try disable Fast boot to see if you can boot to Windows normally.
4. Restore point
   If UMA Buffer and XMP Profile do not help, please try restoring the system to previous working point so we can investigate further.
5. Virtualization-based Security
   If you install WSL 2 then Virtualization-based Security is required. However, you don't need all the Hyper-V and Virtualization components but only the Virtual Machine Platform one. Try enable it only.
   To enable Virtualization-based Security, you also need to enable Memory integrity in Core isolation. And to disable Virtualization-based Security, you need to disable Core isolation too.
6. WSL 1
   If you can't use WSL 2 in your system, please consider switch back to WSL 1 which does not require Virtualization-based Security to be enabled.

I hope above information is helpful to you.

If you have further questions, please feel free to let me know.

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