Microsoft pulls AMD driver from Windows Update that causes boot issues

Discussion in 'Frontpage news' started by Hilbert Hagedoorn, May 10, 2021.

  1. Hilbert Hagedoorn

    Hilbert Hagedoorn Don Vito Corleone Staff Member

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  2. Astyanax

    Astyanax Ancient Guru

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    Curious why they aren't pushing v9.3.1.19 or newer.
     
  3. Calmmo

    Calmmo Guest

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    Yeh got that exact issue on x570 master. Got me into a bootloop that managed to somehow reset the BIOS, loose all profiles but the bloatware that is W10 did actually manage to remove the update and get working again by it self.
     
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  4. Astyanax

    Astyanax Ancient Guru

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    bootloops cannot reset the bios.
     

  5. JonasBeckman

    JonasBeckman Ancient Guru

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    Some hardware apparently has that as a thing, if it's accurate then some earlier Gigabyte motherboards will reset the CMOS and load defaults after 4 loops.
    Or it might report a overclock failure and prompt for entering the bios and suggest resetting to default. Had that on the X79 Intel system whenever the OS crashed for any reason.
    (But just loading a saved bios profile will resolve that.)
     
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  6. Drazen

    Drazen Member

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    About a year ago (sorry if not 100% correct cause of crazy times) I notified AMD and Gigabyte about problem. AMD didn't even replied and Gigabyte as usual: we cannot replicate....

    Problem is Windows loads incorrect SSD driver. In my cause I use SATA RAID and 2 NVMe SSDs without RAID! But after update (AMD chipset) it also loaded NVMe RAID. This also happened few months ago when I updated AMD chipset drivers. My PC boots but second NVMe SSD is invisible (cause of RAID driver).
    This is incorrect configuration (2 NVMe + SATA RAID):
    upload_2021-5-10_9-51-30.png

    And this is correct:
    upload_2021-5-10_9-51-58.png

    Notice difference how second SSD in correct case has driver "Standard NVME Express Controller". In bad case has AMD-RAID Bottom Device.
     
  7. Passus

    Passus Ancient Guru

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    Yes they can,

    Even the MSI board i had for an fx 6300 system did it.

    not had any issues that would cause it on my x570
     
  8. Astyanax

    Astyanax Ancient Guru

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    No they can't.

    The bios doesn't track issues beyond Post, nothing beyond the boot loader can reset the bios (excepting the faulty gigabyte driver used in rgb fusion that can actually erase the bios flashrom itself)

    This only happens in the event cpureset fails amount to a successful post more than twice and its only a reset of the CPU/Ram configuration, not the storage configuration.
     
  9. Rich_Guy

    Rich_Guy Ancient Guru

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    Read about this the other day, luckily though, it never came through for me.
     
  10. Passus

    Passus Ancient Guru

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    Ok so im full of crap am I?

    Alright Mr Right about everything, if you say so o_O
     

  11. Astyanax

    Astyanax Ancient Guru

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    You clearly applied manual intervention without realizing it,

    the efi loader doesn't write back to the UEFI firmware that the boot succeeded or failed at all.
    the efi sata or nvme module launches a libfat based driver to trigger the transition to the EFI boot loader which would be recorded as a success if the uefi firmware did log it, in the event that you even got to this error mesage.

    At the point the device fails in the case of this driver, UEFI has finished post, transitioned to loading the boot device, succeeded in loading the nvme boot loader and used libfat to read and execute bootx64.efi, which then reads the bcd configuration with its own internal ntfs and begins loading ntoskrnl,

    any fault at this point with a driver is not going to reset the BIOS, the failure occurs at the point where windows mounts the volume for boot because the controller driver doesn't know how to reinitialize the controller.
     
  12. hawk7000

    hawk7000 Member

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    If guess it depends on who you mean by "they"...

    Presumably 9.3.0.221 is simply the driver that AMD has provided for publishing on Windows Update. Maybe it was the current driver at the time they decided to put something on Windows Update, maybe it wasn't but was considered a safer choice than the very latest driver, who knows.

    From the perspective of Microsoft getting reports that this driver causes boot failures, it then probably just becomes a matter of either pulling the update or keeping it anyway, all this until AMD comes up with some form of "better idea".
     
  13. Astyanax

    Astyanax Ancient Guru

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    Vendors have no say what so ever in what Microsoft decides to put on WU, any driver that has been WHQL signed is a candidate.

    The issue in this case turned out to be Microsofts own fault, the driver was intended for a subset of corporate deployments that don't routinely get updated by end users.
     
  14. Huggi

    Huggi Active Member

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    There were two posts about this on the r/AMD subreddit. For some reason, it seems only Gigabyte boards were affected as everyone with the issue had one of their X570 boards. No other motherboard brand users reported having the problem nor did any Gigabyte B550 or earlier generation users.
     
  15. Astyanax

    Astyanax Ancient Guru

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    On digging into the driver itself, the afflicted release of the RCBottom driver has transitioned to using Wdf Directed Power framework, however AMD failed to declare "HKR,"WDF","WdfDirectedPowerTransitionEnable",0x00010001,1" in the Inf, so the attached device is stuck in a low powered state and thus unmountable.

    v9.3.1.19 does not make this mistake, where v9.3.1.12 and older does.
     

  16. Solfaur

    Solfaur Ancient Guru

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    Yep, I have this on my GB x570 master. I thought it's just a thing with aging hardware, as for some months I had another issue where when I press shutdown, the system actually restarts. Now I'm 99% sure it's also some driver issue, like this one, since I had no OC whatsoever other than XMP enabled and the after the last bios update I did the system ran fine for many months.

    Is there a way to uninstall these drivers without causing further headache? As for me it's clearly too late and they are installed for a while.
     
  17. Mineria

    Mineria Ancient Guru

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    He stays correct though, there is no way the motherboard will reset the BIOS if it successfully gets past post.
    Falling back to optimized defaults will only happen when the post itself is unstable, which does not include the boot drive nor Windows failing to load and going into a boot-loop.
     
  18. Mineria

    Mineria Ancient Guru

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    Best way to use RGB fusion is to install it, set the lights and then uninstall it again. :D

    Reminds me, finally got my liquid freezer installed,
    [​IMG]
     
  19. EspHack

    EspHack Ancient Guru

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    pff how is this news? lenovo is out there bricking laptops with corrupted bios updates, no user intervention needed at all, in fact, 99% of users cant even stop it

    even more baffling is the reaction from people, either "just send it back" or "constant bios updating is great cuz security"
     
  20. insp1re2600

    insp1re2600 Ancient Guru

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    same here, same board too, resolved itself thankfully.
     
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