Windows 10: DPC Watchdog Violation. Laptop won't boot up.

I think i am going to scan it with spinrite next...

 

+1
I am another "coincidence" with Dell Latitude E6520, whose laptop won't boot with this error since yesterday (9/29/16)

 

I am going to work on the laptop hard over the next two days. I haven't been able to find any hardware issues of any kind. The hard drive is less than a year old.... if you log into safe mode and look at programs, are there a bunch of updates on 9/29/16?

 

I gave up on this - restoring the system to Win7.

In Safe Mode, under the MS updates I saw a few from 9/26/16 (not 9/29).
Removed most of them, but couldn't uninstall 1 - the "uninstall" button wouldn't appear for that one.
Didn't help.

 

Do you remember what it was that you couldn't uninstall?

 

I am 42 hours into a spinrite scan and it has not found any errors. Do you still think this is a hard drive error issue?

 

Unlikely. I've scanned the drive while still on Win10, and there were no errors. Now, that I reverted the system back to Win7, it is running just fine on the same drive.

 

How did you do the set back, did you do a fresh format / install or use the windows 10 tool. This has been on 10 for over a year. If you used the windows 10 tool did you loose data?

 

I didn't use Win10 tool - it was probably too late for that.
I was able to boot into safe mode, and back up the data I needed to the second HD (the system is installed on a SSD drive).
Then I used the recovery partition to freshly re-install win7.

 

Understood. Yeah I thought the restore tool was only 30 days, but in advanced repair options it gives the option to restore back to previous version or something of that nature.

I gave the option to the owner which direction to go. I think an SSD and a fresh install would be best, she likes win 10 though so I am afraid it would happen again with an update

 

Oh, in my case it is my own machine, so the decision making was slightly easier *Smile

 

I have ran into this with several E6520s lately after the big 1607 update. I have two of them in my shop right now. When I find the fix, I'll edit this post to include it.

EDIT: Looks like the fix was removing both the Intel and Nvidia video drivers after booting into safe mode with command prompt. Both of these machines had NVS 4200 chips along with the Intel integrated video. Both were very slow to boot the first time after doing this, but after reinstalling the correct driver's from Dell both are back to normal now.

 

so your machines were dual video card? I am just trying to figure this one out. I did a fresh install on a SSD and ran updates, same issue. This one only appears to have the intel chipset

EDIT: Looks like the fix was removing both the Intel and Nvidia video drivers after booting into safe mode with command prompt. Both of these machines had NVS 4200 chips along with the Intel integrated video. Both were very slow to boot the first time after doing this, but after reinstalling the correct driver's from Dell both are back to normal now.[/QUOTE]

 

Well, my other 6520 is now doing this same thing. Finally got into Safe Mode after an hour of trying. Hopefully these drivers will fix it. *fingers crossed*

 

Well, I got booted up once so that worked. Went to Dell's site and this model isn't listed for Windows 10. I checked Windows 8/64 and it has a driver for the Intel card but the nVidia card just has some sort of security update. I changed to Win7/64 and found a driver there so I guess I'll try that one...