4 ms·

MSDN isn't terrible, but for answers.microsoft.com 90% of questions are some outsourced foreign support rep telling the user to run sfc /scannow and not looking

MSDN isn't terrible, but for answers.microsoft.com 90% of questions are some outsourced foreign support rep telling the user to run sfc /scannow and not looking into the issue any further. Which makes it a huge pain for sysadmin type stuff, their developer documentation is much better.

zaat 5y ago
answers.microsoft.com accepted answers are mostly accepted by the poor foreign support rep after OP have left disappointed. It is somewhat similar in quality to yahoo answers. Microsoft should be ashamed this pile of useless bits is public.
- aksss 5y ago
  Let me make sure I understand the problem you're having trouble getting answers from answers.microsoft.com, is that correct? Please open the site answers.microsoft.com in Microsoft Edge web browser and once the page loads, look for answers there. This should solve the issue. Can you also please run the windows memory diagnostic tool and paste in the output in a reply to this message? Once you have done that, please open your computer and make sure that your CPU is firmly seated in its socket. That will be required to help further. If this has helped solve the problem finding answers on answers.microsoft.com please mark it as correct.
  - tdeck 5y ago
    This is excellent and very representative.
  - carlhjerpe 5y ago
    Please run "sfc /scannow" and dism /online /restore-health" to verify system integrity.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  > It is somewhat similar in quality to yahoo answers. “How is babby formed?" [EDIT] Corrected quote
  - sk5t 5y ago
    "How is babby formed" - for those not participating in the zeitgeist of 2006.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
      Thanks for the correction. I actually missed the original.
Philip-J-Fry 5y ago
Yeah that site is terrible. Spent a few days digging for solutions to fix an issue, always ended up back on that site. Always same old useless information. I had to go to like page 10 of Google results to find some random sysadmin's blog which looked like it came straight out of 2005 and guess what? Problem is explained clearly, steps to fix it are laid out, sorted and wish I found the website 2 days earlier.
m-p-3 5y ago
That's why you don't go there, you go on ServerFault and SuperUser on StackExchange instead.
segfaultbuserr 5y ago
> outsourced foreign support rep telling the user to run sfc /scannow Sysadmin story. Recently I had a really strange problem after a disk migration - defrag.exe simply would not run no matter what (I needed it to TRIM the SSD), it just quits without any messages, as if it's /bin/false. GUI had the same problem. The first search result was a thread at answers.microsoft.com, they give the same canned "sfc /scannow, dism /restorehealth, chkdsk /f" response. But OP finally solved the problem on their own, the "Optimize Drives" service was somehow been stopped, restarting it solved the problem. I tried it, it didn't work. Having no options, I decided to give the seemingly useless solution a shot (why did I bother to try? This was after a disk migration, I felt filesystem corruption could be real). It finally worked after "chkdsk /f"... I was genuinely impressed. It was the first time ever that it actually fixed a real problem for me. Presumably defrag.exe detected a filesystem anomaly and refused to run.
- puppet-master 5y ago
  > defrag.exe simply would not run no matter what (I needed it to TRIM the SSD) Would be interested in the logic here, given that it runs counter to what I thought was extremely obvious advice by now. Defrag generates writes to rearrange blocks in the _virtual_ view of storage visible to the OS, but even after defragmentation, the _physical_ placement is totally outside the control of anything except the firmware. If after defragmentation a file's blocks are arranged (0, 1, 2, 3) in the OS-visible view, in flash are still very likely to to be arranged (412, 77, 1, 12341, 5) etc. All you can do is let it know that some range of sectors is not used, which is what TRIM enables, and that does not require defragmentation upfront.
  - segfaultbuserr 5y ago
    > All you can do is let it know that some range of sectors is not used, which is what TRIM enables, and that does not require defragmentation upfront. This is exactly what defrag.exe does on an SSD today. Since Windows 10 (or 8?), instead of doing a "real" defrag, defrag.exe also has an option to issue TRIM commands to unused blocks on an SSD. In other words, it works like fstrim(1). The time has changed and you must have missed the update. I suggest keeping your knowledge up-to-date before delivering a lecture on disk defragmentation on a forum where everyone should've known better. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/defrag https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrati... > /d Perform traditional defrag (this is the default). > /l Perform retrim on the specified volumes. > /o Perform the proper optimization for each media type. Since I migrated the hard disk using a block-level copy via "dd", it's a good idea to manually TRIM the disk afterwards to inform the controller about the unused blocks in the new filesystem for proper wear leveling (to the controller, the block-level copy looks like a single large file). And before another one gives me another lecture: No, I did not corrupt the filesystem because I made the mistake of copying the disk while Windows was still in Fast Startup mode. It was probably ntfsresize(8), to be fair, the corruption was extremely minor.

zaat 5y ago

answers.microsoft.com accepted answers are mostly accepted by the poor foreign support rep after OP have left disappointed. It is somewhat similar in quality to yahoo answers. Microsoft should be ashamed this pile of useless bits is public.

aksss 5y ago
Let me make sure I understand the problem you're having trouble getting answers from answers.microsoft.com, is that correct? Please open the site answers.microsoft.com in Microsoft Edge web browser and once the page loads, look for answers there. This should solve the issue. Can you also please run the windows memory diagnostic tool and paste in the output in a reply to this message? Once you have done that, please open your computer and make sure that your CPU is firmly seated in its socket. That will be required to help further. If this has helped solve the problem finding answers on answers.microsoft.com please mark it as correct.
- tdeck 5y ago
  This is excellent and very representative.
- carlhjerpe 5y ago
  Please run "sfc /scannow" and dism /online /restore-health" to verify system integrity.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
> It is somewhat similar in quality to yahoo answers. “How is babby formed?" [EDIT] Corrected quote
- sk5t 5y ago
  "How is babby formed" - for those not participating in the zeitgeist of 2006.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
    Thanks for the correction. I actually missed the original.

Philip-J-Fry 5y ago

Yeah that site is terrible. Spent a few days digging for solutions to fix an issue, always ended up back on that site. Always same old useless information. I had to go to like page 10 of Google results to find some random sysadmin's blog which looked like it came straight out of 2005 and guess what? Problem is explained clearly, steps to fix it are laid out, sorted and wish I found the website 2 days earlier.

m-p-3 5y ago

That's why you don't go there, you go on ServerFault and SuperUser on StackExchange instead.

segfaultbuserr 5y ago

> outsourced foreign support rep telling the user to run sfc /scannow Sysadmin story. Recently I had a really strange problem after a disk migration - defrag.exe simply would not run no matter what (I needed it to TRIM the SSD), it just quits without any messages, as if it's /bin/false. GUI had the same problem. The first search result was a thread at answers.microsoft.com, they give the same canned "sfc /scannow, dism /restorehealth, chkdsk /f" response. But OP finally solved the problem on their own, the "Optimize Drives" service was somehow been stopped, restarting it solved the problem. I tried it, it didn't work. Having no options, I decided to give the seemingly useless solution a shot (why did I bother to try? This was after a disk migration, I felt filesystem corruption could be real). It finally worked after "chkdsk /f"... I was genuinely impressed. It was the first time ever that it actually fixed a real problem for me. Presumably defrag.exe detected a filesystem anomaly and refused to run.

puppet-master 5y ago
> defrag.exe simply would not run no matter what (I needed it to TRIM the SSD) Would be interested in the logic here, given that it runs counter to what I thought was extremely obvious advice by now. Defrag generates writes to rearrange blocks in the _virtual_ view of storage visible to the OS, but even after defragmentation, the _physical_ placement is totally outside the control of anything except the firmware. If after defragmentation a file's blocks are arranged (0, 1, 2, 3) in the OS-visible view, in flash are still very likely to to be arranged (412, 77, 1, 12341, 5) etc. All you can do is let it know that some range of sectors is not used, which is what TRIM enables, and that does not require defragmentation upfront.
- segfaultbuserr 5y ago
  > All you can do is let it know that some range of sectors is not used, which is what TRIM enables, and that does not require defragmentation upfront. This is exactly what defrag.exe does on an SSD today. Since Windows 10 (or 8?), instead of doing a "real" defrag, defrag.exe also has an option to issue TRIM commands to unused blocks on an SSD. In other words, it works like fstrim(1). The time has changed and you must have missed the update. I suggest keeping your knowledge up-to-date before delivering a lecture on disk defragmentation on a forum where everyone should've known better. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/defrag https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrati... > /d Perform traditional defrag (this is the default). > /l Perform retrim on the specified volumes. > /o Perform the proper optimization for each media type. Since I migrated the hard disk using a block-level copy via "dd", it's a good idea to manually TRIM the disk afterwards to inform the controller about the unused blocks in the new filesystem for proper wear leveling (to the controller, the block-level copy looks like a single large file). And before another one gives me another lecture: No, I did not corrupt the filesystem because I made the mistake of copying the disk while Windows was still in Fast Startup mode. It was probably ntfsresize(8), to be fair, the corruption was extremely minor.