What is this and how do I fix it?

[octiceps]

I've had my G73JH for about 2 months now and just started getting this random, inexplicable error. It's happened twice this last week and I have lost a considerable amount of unsaved work because of it.

What happened the first time was I put my laptop to sleep in order to do something else and when I came back it had shut down by itself. After booting it back up the first thing that was displayed was the window in the images above. I don't know if my computer actually had a BSOD before it shut down because I was not there to see what happened.

Second time this happened, I just left my computer at idle without putting it to sleep and left the room. My laptop is configured to go to screensaver after 10 minutes and sleep after 15. When I came back this time, my power button was not blinking, meaning the computer was not asleep, but the monitor had shut off and could not be turned back on with the LCD on/off toggle (FN+F7). I had to manually restart the thing by holding the power button, and when it booted back up again the same window appeared. Yet again, I don't know if my computer actually had a BSOD because this time the monitor was turned off.

Any ideas?

[dstrakele]

Since you just started getting this error, it would be worthwhile to use Windows System Restore to restore your system to a time before the issue manifested.

You are getting a STOP 0x9F bug check - DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff559329(v=VS.85).aspx)

It is likely caused by a driver installed on your system. If the restore to an earlier time fails to resolve the issue, we'll need to look more closely at what is installed on your system to identify the problem driver.

Here is an example of a user with the same problem that was able to locate the offending driver: http://www.sevenforums.com/crashes-debugging/197733-laptop-bsod-when-opening-lid-after-sleep-mode-er...

[octiceps]

dstrakele wrote:
Since you just started getting this error, it would be worthwhile to use Windows System Restore to restore your system to a time before the issue manifested.

You are getting a STOP 0x9F bug check - DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff559329(v=VS.85).aspx)

It is likely caused by a driver installed on your system. If the restore to an earlier time fails to resolve the issue, we'll need to look more closely at what is installed on your system to identify the problem driver.

Here is an example of a user with the same problem that was able to locate the offending driver: http://www.sevenforums.com/crashes-debugging/197733-laptop-bsod-when-opening-lid-after-sleep-mode-er...

Hmmm. I installed all the drivers that are currently on my system on the day I got the laptop after reformatting the OS, but this issue has only been occurring in the last week or so. I haven't touched my drivers since 2 months ago.

Thanks for that sevenforums link. It looks like it describes my issue exactly and I'll see what I can find.

[dstrakele]

Don't think just of device drivers. Think of kernel mode drivers installed by applications (i.e. Antivirus, Antimalware, Firewall, Remote Access apps). It is also possible Windows Update installed a new core OS driver version that now conflicts with a previous driver installed on your system.

The easiest first troubleshooting step is to use Windows System Restore to restore your system to a time before the issue occurred (unless you turned it off).

[octiceps]

dstrakele wrote:
Don't think just of device drivers. Think of kernel mode drivers installed by applications (i.e. Antivirus, Antimalware, Firewall, Remote Access apps). It is also possible Windows Update installed a new core OS driver version that now conflicts with a previous driver installed on your system.

The easiest first troubleshooting step is to use Windows System Restore to restore your system to a time before the issue occurred (unless you turned it off).

Unfortunately, system restore is configured to only take up about 12 GB of hard disk space on my system and I just defragmented my hard drive a couple days ago, so pretty much all 12 GB of the space is being used up by the giant restore point that was made when I did the defrag. System restore is not gonna be an option for me to try to fix this.

[octiceps]

You can take a look at the debug dump file and performance monitoring report for this incident here. It's a .zip attachment at the end of my original post. Any ideas as to what is causing this are welcome.