Windows 10 has a new bug that’s crashing PCs with Thunderbolt ports

Windows 10 has another nasty little gremlin that causes a PC to crash with a Blue Screen of Death (BSoD), and as a result some folks have been blocked from upgrading to the May 2020 Update or October 2020 Update (which are the affected versions of the OS).

As described by Microsoft in a support document, the bug happens when the user plugs in an external NVMe SSD into a Thunderbolt port. So obviously, this only affects folks who have the latter connector on their machine, as well as Windows 10’s driver related to said NVMe SSDs.

Microsoft explains: “An incompatibility issue has been found with Windows 10, version 2004 or Windows 10, version 20H2 when using an Thunderbolt NVMe Solid State Disk (SSD).

“On affected devices, when plugging in a Thunderbolt NVMe SSD you might receive a stop error with a blue screen and ‘DRIVER_VERIFIER_DMA_VIOLATION (e6) An illegal DMA operation was attempted by a driver being verified.’

“Affected Windows 10 devices will have at least one Thunderbolt port and any currently available version of the driver file stornvme.sys.”

More widespread?

The error could possibly be a bit more widespread in terms of affected users, at least going by a post on Microsoft’s Answers.com help forum, where a Lenovo laptop owner describes the blue screen error as coming out of nowhere when simply typing in Notepad – although obviously we can’t put too much stock in a single report.

At any rate, Microsoft says it’s working on a resolution for the problem, and the software giant is hopeful that a fix can be delivered later in November. That being the case, the upgrade block will be lifted, and these Windows 10 PCs will be allowed to install the latest update (which is now the October 2020 Update, of course).