Repeated crashes BSOD "CRITICAL PROCESS DIED"

Question

I'm running Windows 11 on a Dell XPS 8940, and trying to diagnose repeated crashes, where the BSOD comes up with CRITICAL PROCESS DIED (and never gets beyond 0% on "collecting information"). The event viewer shows Source Event Kernel-Power, Event ID 41 (63). For most of these crashes the BugCheckCode is 239 (critical process died) with various values under BugCheckParameter1. The most recent Windows update was over two weeks ago and this problem didn't start until two days ago so I don't think it's resulting from a rogue update. To my knowledge there have been no recent driver updates, but I haven't plowed through all the device drivers to try to figure it out. I've done the following to try to fix it:

1. Updated BIOS firmware, reset BIOS to factory settings, set RTC.
2. Ran DISM Restorehealth and sfc /scannow. Problems were found and corrected.
3. Ran chkdsk /f /r. Errors found and fixed.

After #3 there were no crashes for the rest of the day and overnight, but after two hours of work this morning it crashed again and has been crashing repeatedly since then, often within a few minutes of restarting. On some of these I get the same source and event ID, but all zeroes under event details. It's been running in safe mode for about half an hour as I type this and hasn't crashed yet.

I'm starting to think it may be an actual power issue, but power supply self-testing on this computer is very limited. Also, with the processor setup on this machine it can't overclock.

I appreciate any help anyone can offer with this.

Answer 1

Hello

When the crash occurred, it would be stuck on 0%, right?

This usually means there is problem with the hard drive. After the BSOD occurred, windows will save the memory information to page file (located in C:\ drive as hidden file). If the writing process completed, it would go to 100%. If it was stuck here, there may be something wrong with the disk. It could be disk corruption issue or something such as antivirus software on the machine prevent the memory information from writing to the disk.

If there is any antivirus software installed, please try to remove it then reboot to check.

Since the chkdsk command detect some errors, the disk may have been corrupted. Though the chkdsk command would fix the errors, it just isolate the corrupted setcor. It wouldn't fix the physical corruption.