Windows Insider builds keeps bricking my laptop

Copper Contributor

Hello

For some reason which probably never will become apparent to me, I signed up for the Windows Insider builds. After not exactly a long time, my laptop went into a UNEXPECTED_KERNEL_MODE_TRAP, and my only option was to reinstall Windows 10. But then it installed the preview build and not an actually working version of Windows. And now I'm at the bootloop again. I can't rollback to a previous version of Windows due to an unknown error. I'm not also sure were I successful in stopping the Insider builds. Would someone care to help me so that I could reclaim my laptop as a working machine. I don't have information about the build version cause I'm about the reinstall Windows 10 again. For whosoever might be interested, the laptop is Acer VX15-591G. Any help would be appreciated, thank you.

EDIT: I can access Safe Mode, but there's nothing worthwhile there that I could do to restore the functionality of Windows. I need to probably be doing system restore points from now on. I tried to do sfc /scannow but it failed, chkdsk /r didn't find anything of use, and the Event Viewer looks like basically the system thoroughly fails on boot.

 

EDIT2: Build is 17035.rs_prerelease.171103-1616

4 Replies

That error indicates a high chance that you have a hardware issue which means that the boot loop is a symptom only. It *may* be possible that the pre-release has some code that's causing or interacting with your CPU or other hardware to create the boot loop. Having no issues in Safe Mode supports that it could be a hardware/driver or CPU issue still.

 

Reinstalling Windows will not have any effect to resolve that if that is in fact the issue.

 

Prior to doing anything like re-installing, try a selective boot using these steps and confirm if the boot-loop goes away: How to perform a clean boot in Windows

 

After that you'll start getting enough info to try to diagnose if you have a hardware or driver issue by selectively turning things back on.

Thanks for the tips. Would you have any idea as to what hardware it may be referring to? I know that without any diagnostics it's a wild guess, but I have seen references to a defective RAM while reading up on the issue online.

Dos the device have built in diagnostics? If so run those on everything including CPU and memory.  Yeah, memory is always "low hanging fruit" but keep in mind that may mean the hard drive (where the virtual memory actually is).

If you can access the physical memory and remove/re-seat it. From what I saw here (https://us.answers.acer.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/46306/session/L3RpbWUvMTUxMDc3OTcyNi9zaWQvZlVseU...) the drives look to be spinning disk and not SSD so that's something to check with an offline disk check (chkdsk /f /v /r & then check the logs after the boot to confirm if there's any bad sectors).

Yeah I should probably test RAM modules as well. I did several disk checks, and sometimes the Windows error checking tool reported errors, and sometimes no. Now I did a fresh install off of USB and it seems that I finally got rid of the Insider-version. Let's hope it now works.