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I help run a service that uses hundreds of Windows boxes, and at any one time two or three of them always seem to have a borked windows update state. Recovery i
by kabdib 6y ago
I help run a service that uses hundreds of Windows boxes, and at any one time two or three of them always seem to have a borked windows update state. Recovery is utter fucking voodoo, and it's usually better to flatten a machine than attempt to repair things.
A while back I installed a couple racks of shiny, new, absolutely identical servers (except for MAC addresses) with factory-imaged operating systems, and had two of them fail initial windows updates. Out of the box. How do you even do that?
- gruez 6y ago>How do you even do that? flaky hardware?
- craftinator 6y agoLolz yeah right. It's the hardware's fault that windows install is non deterministic.
- aceperry 6y agoI hear a variation of this type of thing from windows fans constantly. "It's your hardware's fault." But never Window's fault. My experience is this; most of my computers are dual boot with windows and linux. When I have a problem with windows, I'll boot into linux and the problem goes away. Same hardware.
- kabdib 6y agoIt's definitely not flaky hardware.
- HideousKojima 6y agoIn my experience booting from USB and installing the updates from that works 99.99% of the time, for the remaining 0.01% nuking it is the only option
- jiggawatts 6y agoMy favourite Windows bug is the Start Menu search function. Install Windows Server 2016 or 2019 in any manner you choose: Blank VM with ISO image, new Azure VM from Microsoft template, whatever. Try using the Start Menu. Nothing will work. The search upon typing will not show all items. If you click on a search result, it won't launch. Type "SQL" to try and match "Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio" and be shocked to find that it doesn't. But it matches on "Management"! It's not that it didn't index it, it's just that it couldn't be bothered fully indexing it... or something. Type "Internet" and you won't see Internet Options. Sometimes it won't show up even if you've typed "Internet Opt". You have to complete the search to "Internet Options", character-for-character to reveal that it exists. Etc... It blows my mind that this could be fucked up, not just once, but for every single Windows release since Vista, in similar but different ways.
- tonyedgecombe 6y agoI've seen this on Windows 10. There are a bunch of suggestions online but none of them worked for me. I ended up re-installing to fix the problem.
- londons_explore 6y agoI suspect that search indexing is slow and you weren't patient enough. Leave that machine a week and everything will be indexed...
- foepys 6y agoNo, Windows regularly changes the index order and "learns" what you commonly type and what you click for which phrase. This leads to absurd situations where the index show different programs for each letter. For example on my machine: Up > Windows Update first Upd > Lenovo System Update first Upda > Windows Update first Update > Lenovo System Update is the only result When I search for Visual Studio, only a few programs are found. I made a shortcut for the Visual Studio Command prompt because Windows search regularly threw it out of the results. One day it's there, the next it's gone. Horrible UX.
- tyingq 6y ago"How do you even do that?" I would guess it's something like non-deterministic order of patch installation. Which seems easy to end up doing even if you think it's deterministic. For example, some patches don't finish install until boot time, so unexpected reboots could bork things. Or things like "can't install this patch while X software is running", etc.
- JetSpiegel 6y agoWhy bother with patches then, just send the latest version. Now that Microsoft doesn't even support partial updates anymore, it's the rolling release train or nothing.