Sunday, December 4, 2016

On the DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE crash error, and the fix

Recently, my desktop (Windows 10) has sometimes shutted down a little while after going into standby mode.

Using WhoCrashed (nice little program to analyse dump files) I'm getting the following information:

This was probably caused by the following module: ntoskrnl.exe (nt+0x14A510)
Bugcheck code: 0x9F (0x3, 0xFFFFB50F12FF9E40, 0xFFFFF8014B530960, 0xFFFFB50F1C1A7010)
Error: DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILUREfile path: C:\WINDOWS\system32\ntoskrnl.exe
product: Microsoft® Windows® Operating Systemcompany: Microsoft Corporationdescription: NT Kernel & System
Bug check description: This bug check indicates that the driver is in an inconsistent or invalid power state.
This appears to be a typical software driver bug and is not likely to be caused by a hardware problem.
The crash took place in the Windows kernel. Possibly this problem is caused by another driver that cannot be identified at this time. 
After doing some research, I found someone who had a similar problem, and their solution was to remove old drivers for a USB device.
I have a cheap USB Bluetooth dongle which came with some driver software called
CSR Harmony Wireless Software Stack 4.0.

I uninstalled the driver software using Revo Uninstaller (Very useful to remove all, if not most of an application) and removed the device.

Haven't had issues since.