Is my hardware dying?

[Snowy]

Hello all,
Very strange experience on this New Year's Eve.
Today I was playing Deadlock and suddenly my game froze. Video was still displayed on the screen, but all my peripherals were out. Hadn't seen my game crash like this before, but decided to force power down, power back on (after about 10 seconds), and rejoin the game. After about 5 minutes in game, this happened again. I repeat the process, and try joining the game again. Same thing.

At this point, I'm not sure what's going on, but now start to troubleshoot whether it's the hardware or maybe a buggy patch that has destabilized the game for me. So I download FurMark to stress test the CPU / GPU and check on temperatures. Temps seem good and no artifact issues, but after about 10 minutes, same thing. Completely frozen, all peripherals are gone and am forced to force power down.

I decide then to open up my box and make sure everything has a secure connection, etc. Reset the bios (remove battery for 5 sec) and try to power back in. When I try to boot back into Windows I'm met with a "0xc0000098" and "0xc0000221" error blue screen which says a critical system driver is missing or has errors. A quick search on Kagi says this might be related to a drive failure, so I boot into Linux (POP_OS!) which is installed on a separate drive to try and get into my Windows drive and create a quick backup on my external drive. Well, for the first 10 minutes of being in Linux, I'm unable to access anything on the Windows drive. Linux can detect that it's there, but am unable to explore the contents of the drive. After about 10 minutes I'm then able to access. After creating a quick backup, I decided to give Windows another try, so I restart and boot into Windows. I am now typing this on Windows and thus far nothing seems out of the ordinary at all.

What does everyone make of this?

edit - 10 minutes of FurMark & CPU Burner running concurrently and no stability issues... 75.6C on the CPU and 65C on the GPU.

 

[LazyGamer]

Potentially, drive / filesystem issues or memory issues.

For filesystem, Microsoft has a guide:

Use the System File Checker tool to repair missing or corrupted system files - Microsoft Support

Describes how to use the System File Checker tool to troubleshoot missing or corrupted system files in Windows.

support.microsoft.com

For memory issues, run y-cruncher, setting the largest size you can according to your memory capacity. You can get a quick and easy y-cruncher interface using Benchmate (also includes a lot of other useful stuff that you might otherwise have individually installed):

BenchMate

benchmate.org

If it all checks out... it all checks out. Stability is a spectrum, not a binary status unfortunately!

 

[Brian_B]

When you see weird non-repeatable errors like this, it's usually either the hard drive or the RAM.

I just had one recently where the RAM tested fine, but computer wouldn't sleep and got random BSODs/weird file system issues. Didn't find it until we started pulling hardware -- ran off 1 stick of RAM and it ran fine for a week. Put the second back in, problem back.