Older techie here, rusty, working on my home business laptop and gaming rig, could sure use an expert's opinion. I've been beating my head on this for past 48 hours and hoping someone will take pity on me this holiday weekend... here's a synopsis of the issue:
Acer Predator TRITON 500 (PT515-52) running Windows 11 began to have issues a few weeks ago, repeated crashes until last week became severe. The issue was tracked down to SSD (see below). Two new SSD were installed (rather painfully, as this beast is not for the weak of heart to upgrade!), system powered up, but I cannot get past the non-bootable device. Windows 11 USB drive created with Win11 Media Creation Tool will not boot from USB, consistently gives BSOD Stop Code "Kernel Security Check Failure".
Here's what I've done so far, and my troubleshooting:
1. I have created not one but THREE USB Windows 11 bootable drives... I know they work as I had used one of them to reinstall windows 11 as a clean install on the old SSD. If it matters, I used a PNY 32 GB usb cheap drives but as I said, they were able to boot up on same laptop on old SSD before I removed it but cannot boot now. Also, I tested the USB ports with a USB mouse (works) and moved the drive to another port just to rule out hardware/port issue.
2. The old SSD was definitely the cause of the core original problem (before this one). I've run both Acer and third-party diagnostics, and all show memory and other components were running fine. Old SSD was 80% full, and when I ran Acer Care Center before upgrading old SSD, memory and all other components passed, SSD drive check would fail, system would crash. I replicated this 3 times and the SSD drive test would never run, would always crash.
3. Ran a command CHKDSK which identified major issues; after two or three runs CHKDSK was able to repair issues, and the drive stabilized dramatically. Nevertheless, I had already ordered replacements, and decided to proceed with upgrade since I was running out of space and the drive proved unreliable already.
4. I carefully removed the old SSD from motherboard, and installed two drives: in position 0, I installed a western digital WD_BLACK SN850X 4TB, and in position 1, I installed a WD Green SN350 2TB drive. both drives have been consistently recognized by the bios (see below).
5. When laptop boots up, it seemed the BIOS had reset, and initially would give no bootable drive error. Rebooted with Win11 USB drive created with Media Creation Tool (USB boot drive setting), however received BSOD Stop error "Kernel Security Check Failure" (from now on, BSOD-KSCF for short).
6. I'm running the latest Acer BIOS, version 1.1 with the annoyingly modern GUI (I miss the old text based BIOS). I scoured the Acer community and several online sources to better understand this BIOS, and there is scant little, but I was able to deduce some steps needed (see #7 below).
7. After initial failure in #5 above was replicated a few times, I followed all steps and still kept getting BSOD-KSCF.
8. Before writing this, I reset Bios to default configuration, restarted, still got BSOD-KSCF.
9. After clean reset to default configuration, I effected the following changes again, specifically:
-turned OFF Fast Boot
-turned OFF TBM(TCM)
-turned OFF Secure Boot (after setting up a supervisory password for the BIOS).
After #9. I saved all settings, exited, and still receive BSOD-KSCF error with any one of the three Win11 USB drives plugged in.
The above has been replicated several times to ensure I didn't miss anything, and as I stated, the drives are mounted and visible to the OS... I just cannot get the USB drive to boot, and cannot get past the BSOD.
PLEASE HELP...what am I missing or what obscure setting or magic key should I turn?
Thanks for any and all support.
[Edited the thread to add model name]
