Help...Issue with WD SN850x Boot Drive

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Particulars: Windows 11, Asus Dark Hero MB, Corsair Dominator Memory, SN850x boot drive 4TB, Multiple other drives including a 2TB WD SN850, Samsung 980 Pro 2 TB, 2x Samsung 850 SSDs, WD Hard Drive. NVME controller is Microsoft. Everything is up-to-date including firmware for all drives. So have 3 m.2 drives (2x WD, 1x Samsung)

My issue started with long shutdown/restart times. After some troubleshooting, reboots would sometimes not load into windows without powering off & restarting, or would load into windows but go to black screen although could move cursor. When I successfully got into windows, decided to check for issues with boot drive. Running SFC, had no issues. Went to use WD Dashboard (latest version) and running short diagnostic test, it would say operation failed. Then initiated a chkdsk. The check disk completed but ultimately I got a BSOD. Windows couldn’t repair prompt. After reading lots of posts, I thought this issue could be fixed my replacing the Microsoft Express Controller with the 64bit Micron NVMe driver v2.1.19.0 driver. Concerned that if I change the driver to Micron, the system potentially may not boot at all, which would not be bad news. Not sure how to revert back to MS drivers if this were to happen. So I’m hesitating and looking for advice.

  1. Will this likely solve the problem of WD Dashboard not being able to successfully complete the Short Diagnostic Check? Thinking that if it could, it would correct any drive errors?
  2. There are 3 instances of the Standard NVM Express Controller in Device Mgr/Storage Controller. I assume there is one for each m.2 drive. Do I need to change all three or just the one for the Boot Drive (WD SN850x). If just the boot drive, how can I find out which instance is for the boot drive. Each instance identifies the PCI bus, device, function.
  3. Any other advice would be appreciated. Thought about reverting to an older version of WD Dashboard but couldn’t find anything on the web.

I’ll supply more info if needed.

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Well solved my own problem. I did create a support case and talked to a WD technical rep, however but as expected, the proposed solution was to do the dreaded reformat & reinstall. For my system, reinstallation would take days with all the applications and tweaks.

The solution was somewhat a shot in the dark. I read a number of posts discussing the status of their drives being “security frozen”. As it happens, all my WD drives have this same status. In looking at suggestions to resolve this issue folks suggested this was related to bios settings. Since installing Windows a few years ago, I had set CSM to disabled. I must have done this so Windows could be installed, in my case, to a Samsung 980 Pro 2TB. Never thought about this setting again as no issues were encountered. Eventually cloned the Samsung to the WD 850x 4TB.

Decided to re-enable CSM and set it to Windows UEFI. Bingo. WD Dashboard Short Diagnostic Test successfully runs to completion. Also it found no errors. This did not solve the “Security Frozen” status or the BSOD after completion of a dskchk on the boot drive. Next will be to turn off the bios security (TPM) settings to see if that solves these other issues. If they do, then it will be a choice as to what is the best path. This may still be a WD issue with W11 but can’t say for sure now.

Has anyone else explored similar issues?

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Looks like your BIOS configuration needs to be reset to optimized