Computer: Custom build – Gigabyte B450 Aorus Pro mainboard + AMD Ryzen 7 2700X CPU with Microsoft Windows 10
Problem description
Windows kept blue-screen crashing, with an error saying “SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED” anywhere from 5-15 minutes after booting up, regardless of what is being done on the computer (even light work, like web browsing). Occasionally crashed with a “PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA” error too.
BlueScreenView (https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/blue_screen_view.html, side note – this is an absolutely invaluable tool in diagnosing and fixing blue screen crashes) showed that the crash was happening from “envirtahci.sys”.
Determined Cause
Something had gone wrong with the Virtual Storage Spaces Driver from AMD’s StoreMI drive cache software. That’s what “envirtahci.sys” is.
The crash has nothing to do with RAM memory issues or drive failures – that was a complete waste of time running memtest and hard drive tests.
Solution
Completely uninstall AMD StoreMI and its driver from the computer (then if you need it, download the latest version from AMD’s website, available in the chipset drivers section, and install it afterward). There’s 3 steps to that: first, find StoreMI in the Windows applications list and click the usual Uninstall button. Second, open Device Manager, find the AMD Virtual Storage Spaces (or similar) “device” under the Storage Controllers section, click Update Driver, select to Manually select a driver, and select the generic Microsoft driver from the list. Third, find the StoreMI folder from the C:\Program Files (or the x86 folder? I don’t remember)\AMD folder and delete it.
Now you can reinstall it if you need. AMD StoreMI is a software that lets you “merge” a fast solid state drive with a slower but large capacity spinning hard drive to create one “virtual” merged drive with the SSD as a cache, so that the combined thing will have faster read/write speeds than the spinning hard drive by itself, but with the larger storage capacity of the spinning drive compared to the solid state drive. If you don’t plan to use this kind of a system, don’t reinstall StoreMI at all. A lot of times, it comes preinstalled on OEM computers as an “in case you need it”, and you may not be using it at all.