Windows 10 Updates Cause CorsairVBusDriver BSOD Crash Loop

Microsoft’s December 2020 Windows 10 updates are conflicting with the Corsair Utility Engine software and causing the operating system to go into a BSOD crash loop.

After the December 2020 Patch Tuesday updates were released, Windows 10 users began reporting that the operating system would go into a crash loop where Windows would restart and automatically crash and restart again.

When Windows 10 crashes, it would display a blue screen showing the “Stop code – SYSTEM THREAD EXCEPTION NOT HANDLED” error and stating the CorsairVBusDriver.sys drive failed, as shown below.

Microsoft has not acknowledged this conflict in any of their support bulletins for the recent Windows 10 updates, but we can expect them to put a safeguard hold on Windows 10 updates soon.

It should be noted that people have been complaining about the CorsairVBusDriver.sys crashes since December 8th, but today BleepingComputer saw a huge surge in people who were affected. If Microsoft is offering an optional update for the Corsair drivers, do not install them, as this could explain the surge we are seeing.

BleepingComputer has reached out to Microsoft with questions regarding these crashes.

How to fix the Windows 10 CorsairVBusDriver.sys BSOD crashes

If you are affected by these crashes, you will not be able to boot into Windows. Therefore, we need to rename or remove the conflicting CorsairVBusDriver.sys driver using the Windows 10 Recovery Environment.

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Method 1: Rename the CorsairVBusDriver.sys driver in Recovery Environment

The easiest way to fix the CorsairVBusDriver.sys crashes is to boot Windows 10 into the Recovery Environment and rename the driver.

To rename the CorsairVBusDriver.sys driver, please follow these steps:

1. Boot into the Windows 10 Recovery screen (see booting to safe mode, but select command prompt instead of “Startup Settings”).
2. Click “See more advanced recovery options.”
3. Click on “Troubleshoot.”
4. Click on “Advanced options.”
5. Click on “Command Prompt.”
6. At the command prompt type diskpart and press Enter on your keyboard.
7. Type list vol and press Enter. You should now see a list of drive letters and the partition size for each drive. Look for the drive letter whose size matches your normal C:\ drive and write that drive letter down.Caption
8. Type exit and press Enter to exit the diskpart utility.
9. Switch to the drive associated with your C: drive. For example, when we used diskpart above, our drive letter is D, so we would type D: at the command prompt and then press Enter.
10. When you switch to the new drive, type dir and press Enter. If you see the Windows folder then you are in the right drive.
11. Now type cd \windows\system32\drivers and press Enter. Note: There is a space beween cd and \windows.
12. You should now be at the [drive-letter]:\Windows\system32\driver prompt. At this prompt, type ren corsairvbusdriver.sys corsairvbusdriver.sys.bak and press Enter, as shown below.Rename the CorsairVBusDriver.sys driver

1. If you do not receive an error when renaming the driver, type exit and press Enter to exit the command prompt.
2. Click on the “Continue” option to restart your computer and boot into Windows 10.
3. Once you log into Windows 10, you should uninstall the Corsair Utility software.

If this does not work, please try method 2 below.

Method 2: Uninstall the driver using the Recovery Environment

A BleepingComputer member was kind enough to create detailed steps on how to resolve these crashes and posted them in our forums. I have slightly modified the steps to make them more understandable for those not familiar with the command prompt.

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To resolve the Windows 10 CorsairVBusDriver.sys BSOD crashes, please use the following steps:

1. You don’t need a Windows Installation disk to perform these steps. Instead, you can perform this by using the built-in Windows 10 recovery command prompt.
   1. Boot up into the Windows 10 Recovery screen (see booting to safe mode, but select command prompt instead of “Startup Settings”).
   2. Click “See more advanced recovery options.”
   3. Click on “Troubleshoot.”
   4. Click on “Advanced options.”
   5. Click on “Command Prompt.”
2. Once you’re in the command prompt, you will need to mount your Windows System Partition (as this is not automatically mounted):
   1. Type diskpart into the command prompt and press Enter.
   2. Type list disk and press Enter. You’ll see some output with some disks (starting at 0) with sizes. Usually, your System drive will be Drive 0. You can make a good guess by the drive size.
   3. Type select disk x and press Enter, where x is your system drive from the results from step 2.
   4. Type list part and press Enter to see a list of partitions. A normal Win 10 install will have 4 partitions: 1 – Recovery, 2 – System, 3 – Reserved, and 4 – Primary. If you don’t find a primary partition, change disk (step 3) and repeat until you find your system partition.
   5. Type select part x, where x is your primary system partition (will be the biggest partition from step 4).
   6. Type assign letter=Z and press Enter to assign your primary partition a drive letter (Z).
   7. Exit diskpart by typing exit and then pressing Enter.
3. We now need to remove the dodgy driver using the dism command:
   1. Run dism /Image:Z: /Get-Drivers | more to display a list of installed drivers. When I did this, it opened up the driver list in notepad. Use Ctrl-F to find the driver you’re looking for and note down the Published Name (should be oemxx.inf).
   2. Run dism /Image:Z: /Remove-Driver /Driver:oemxxx.inf where the oemxxx.inf is the published name from step 1.
4. Exit the command prompt by typing exit and then pressing Enter. Now reboot your computer and cross your fingers!

Other users pointed out this extra information:

• “I’d also like to add that you might have multiple instances of the CorsairVBusDriver.sys driver so don’t stop looking after just one. (took me a while to figure out)”
• “A crucial difference I had when following the directions was that when I found the corsairvbus driver but it wasn’t called Driver.oemxxx.inf as shown in the instructions. I don’t recall what my exact one was but if you can access that driver list just keep looking through it until you find the corsairvbus driver and then replace the oemxxx.inf part of the instruction with whatever yours might be.”

If you run into issues or need more help, you can read the various suggestions or request assistance in the forum topic.

Once the CorsairVBusDriver.sys driver is removed, you should be able to reboot without receiving the crash. 

Update 12/18/20: Added additional method of renaming the CorsairVBusDriver.sys driver.