Event ID 20 - WHEA-Logger - AMD Northbridge

Alas it's not the same for me. I made sure that my notebook was not infected (actually it was and I had to perform several cleanings) yet, after only two weeks since last restart, the reboot happened again - even though my notebook is certainly updated to 1803.

I will keep this thread updated if anything good happens.

GC

I'll offer my explanation, based on reading a LOT of these posts, and on some (very limited) experience with microprocessor architectures and designs, and some with OS internals.

"Fast Boot" has nothing to do with the speed of the hardware.  It is all about how the operating system is loaded into memory and executed.

"Cold, slow boot" means that first, the Kernel is loaded. Then it loads, piece by piece, all of the tens of thousands of parts of the operating system, using the Registry to guide its work. It has to link things together, resolve addresses for where things are going to live, set up all of the hardware interfaces and controls...  This is what has to be done for a reboot when you've installed new software, or new hardware, or updated a driver or a part of the OS or one of its many, many utilities.  "Where do I put this new thing?" is a question the OS load has to ask and answer, constantly.

Now... when you shut down... hibernate causes that fully-linked-together, everything-loaded image of the working, in-RAM, in-virtual-memory operating system to be saved to a hibernate file.  If you re-awaken from hibernation, all that happens is that this hibernate image file is loaded quickly into memory, and then the loader assumes it's a good image and turns control over to it.

Windows has had hibernation since XP. (It is NOT "sleep," just to confuse things further.  Sleep requires power to stay on to your RAM; Hibernate does not.)

"FAST BOOT" is just powering on your machine and using the last hibernation image to load the system with.

So why are AMD processor machines crashing, perhaps every 10th or 50th fast boot?  I suspect that there is a very low-level hardware feature in these processors that is subtly different than the Intel designs, in ways that 99% of the time don't matter. But that 1%... if that's an instruction pre-fetch cache, for example, that is not initialized the same way, or initialized in ways that change as you change the order of doing things on your computer... then, you get a hardware fault that interrupts the system and causes an emergency shutdown.

I'm one of those happy campers who set his wife's AMD machine to "slow boot," and since then we have not had a repeat of this problem.

I hope this makes sense.  I consider spending two to three minutes extra per day (we only cold boot once a day) a small price to pay for not losing work.  If we had to travel and were constantly turning that machine on and off for a few minutes, and needed fast boot, we'd have to choose between convenience and risk.

Questions, comments, corrections always welcomed,

Mike

Hi,

in my case the video card was the cause: not happened ever since I sent it back to the e-shop where I bought it. It was a Sapphire R9 290.

Good luck

Since updating to Windows 8.1 I've never had this Problem again.

Since doing this, it has now crashed and restarted TWICE tonight.

Windows 8 has been an unmitigated disaster for me, I wish I hadn't upgraded from Windows 7.  Its been problem after problem.

Last avenue is AMD support, but that doesn't look hopeful.