If this BSOD is a symptom of my onboard NICs beginning to fail, then I can just disable the NICs and pop in a new NIC. I've read that disabling EIST and C1E is a possible fix for this particular BSOD, but I haven't been able to confirm this. I know Vista's sleep function is less than perfect, but it seems strange that this issue would pop up all of a sudden.
This was the basis for my uninstalling the NICs from device manager and reinstalling them.Īny thoughts on how to troubleshoot this further? I haven't added any hardware to my system since it was built, and the only driver change to the NIC was the update I applied after the first BSOD. It remains to be seen whether this solves the problem, as the BSOD is infrequent.Īnother interesting thing is that Microsoft reported the error being caused by "a missing driver for Realtek RTL8168/8111 Family PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet NIC (rtlh86.sys, rtlh64.sys), which was created by Realtek Semiconductor Corp." Since the onboard NIC is a PCI (not PCIe) RTL8169/8110, it may have been misidentified by the OS somehow. I also disabled the second NIC in the BIOS since I'm not using it anyway. As a result, I decided to uninstall all of the network drivers and use Microsoft's default driver to see if maybe that will make the problem go away. Further investigation of the minidump showed that the Realtek driver was again the cause (with DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE as the error). This evening, upon resuming from S3 sleep, I got an error message that Windows had recovered from an unexpected shutdown. Step 3 In the device manager, you will view a list of devices that are connected to your PC. Step 2 Type devmgmt.msc and hit Enter or click OK. Step 1 Press Windows key + R on your keyboard. The first time this happened was two weeks ago, at which time I updated the drivers to the most recent version from Realtek's site. If upgrading outdated drivers does not solve driver power state failure error, try reinstalling them. Recently, I've had two BSODs caused by a "Driver Power State Failure" in one of the onboard NICs (a RealTek 8169/8110) when my system attempts to enter S3 Sleep. I have a self-built system that has been running solidly for well over a year.