Microsoft Fixes Windows 10 Version 20H2 Thunderbolt BSOD Bug

The safeguard hold remains in place until later this month

Microsoft has recently fixed an issue in Windows 10 version 2004 and version 20H2 and causing a Blue Screen of Death when plugging in a Thunderbolt NVMe SSD.

The company acknowledged the problem in early November, and now it says the whole thing has already been fixed, though for the time being, a safeguard hold remains in place.

And the reason is as simple as it could be: the fix was part of the latest optional cumulative update for Windows 10, and Microsoft plans to remove the hold later this month when the workaround goes live for production devices too with the cumulative update going live on Patch Tuesday.

This is projected to happen on December 8.

Safeguard hold still in place

The safeguard hold means devices that are potentially affected by the problem wouldn’t receive the upgrade to Windows 10 version 2004 or version 20H2 on Windows Update.

“An incompatibility issue has been found with Windows 10, version 2004 or Windows 10, version 20H2 when using an Thunderbolt NVMe Solid State Disk (SSD). On affected devices, when plugging in a Thunderbolt NVMe SSD you might receive a stop error with a blue screen and "DRIVER_VERIFIER_DMA_VIOLATION (e6) An illegal DMA operation was attempted by a driver being verified." Affected Windows 10 devices will have at least one Thunderbolt port and any currently available version of the driver file stornvme.sys,” Microsoft explains.

The company also recommends against using other alternative methods to download and install Windows 10 version 2004 or version 20H2, explaining that users could eventually come across fatal crashes after installing these OS versions.

At this point, it’s obviously just a matter of time until the upgrade block is lifted, so make sure you install the next round of cumulative updates if you too experienced issues with Thunderbolt NVMe SSDs.