AMD Radeon’s Rare Bug Caused Windows Failing To Boot, Investigation Ongoing

AMD Radeon’s Rare Bug Caused Windows Failing To Boot, Investigation Ongoing

The latest 23.2.x driver is pointed as the culprit – but only a handful of user has seen this rare glitch so far.

PCWorld editor Brad Chacos has found out his GPU benchmarking system has failed to boot since last week, and subsequent investigation found out that the new Radeon 23.2.x driver is the root cause. There are workarounds – as AMD is currently investigating the issue.

The story started off with a rather normal GPU installation process as the editor swaps in a new AIB Radeon RX 7900 XT for testing, as the “Factory Reset” option is checked (which forces a clean driver install), the system is then likely corrupted as there could be a Windows Update running concurrently in the background during the driver installation. The mishap has caused the system to spit out INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE error in the form of Blue Screen of Death (BSoD), and attempting to reboot into automatic repair mode has in fact made the situation worse.

It turned out that this bug has surfaced since mid-February when the 23.2.1 driver was released: (Editor’s note: we have in fact reviewed the Radeon RX 7900 XTX using this particular driver, however we opted for standard driver install after DDU so this bug never occurred to our benchmarking system.)

Be careful when you install the latest Adrenalin 23.2.1. Backup your data!#AMD #Driver https://t.co/dOVZSth7OQ

— CapFrameX (@CapFrameX) February 15, 2023

 

A back-and-forth with AMD representative has narrowed down the cause of the bug with turned out to be an extremely rare case of unfortunate luck with Windows Update and Radeon drivers crashing into each other. It took the company dozens of attempts to recreate the issue due to the rarity of this bug, but the temporary workaround is very simple – just deselect ‘Factory Reset’ in the driver install.

What if you are among the affected users that now has a system unable to boot? In that case, AMD says you can attempt to force the recovery menu to appear by cutting power in the very small time window between the BIOS prompt (i.e. Press ‘F2’ to enter BIOS Menu) and the Windows boot process (a spinning circle in the bottom half of the screen). This will take a few tries – as that window can go past easily in merely a second. From that point you can choose System Restore to recover the state of the OS – though the editor warned not to use Startup Repair as that can worsen the situation.

As it stands right now, AMD is working on a fix to this extremely rare bug so in the meantime, just avoid selecting “Factory Reset” option until a fix has arrived. (Alternatively, if you do need to perform a clean install, use DDU instead. It has an option to prevent automatic default installation on system reboot should you need an absolutely clean driver installs.)

Source: PCWorld

Pokdepinion: Amongst all of this I feel like it could’ve been easily solved with the good old F8 boot menu. Why did Microsoft chose to remove that option since Windows 10 and forces everyone to deliberately fail the system 3 times in order to enter recovery mode in the event of complete boot failures?