9 ms·

My Snapdragon Dev Kit was healthy and working fine until a Windows update failed

207 points by jasoneckert 9mo ago

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
_ache_ 9mo ago
Snapdragon is already canceled so I guess, they just don't care about this device. It's Microsoft on ARM. Sad to say, but don't expect full support or quality update on this. Ref: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrA2Xe9f7e8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrA2Xe9f7e8 - https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/qualcomm-snapdragon-dev-kit-windows-teardown-2024/ https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/qualcomm-snapdragon-d...
- OptionOfT 9mo ago
  No, the dev kit was cancelled. There are ARM laptops out there from multiple manufacturers, and there is a SnapDragon 2 on the horizon.
- 999900000999 9mo ago
  I wanted to order one of these and then Qualcomm cancelled it. Then I knew Windows ARM probably wasn't going to make it. Why any technical person would want a PC( not including Macs)that explicitly can't run Linux I'll never know.
  - kllrnohj 9mo ago
    > Why any technical person would want a PC that explicitly can't run Linux I'll never know. Huh? https://www.phoronix.com/review/snapdragon-x1e-september https://www.phoronix.com/review/snapdragon-x1e-september
    - theevilsharpie 9mo ago
      More recent revisit: https://www.phoronix.com/review/snapdragon-x-elite-linux-eoy2025 https://www.phoronix.com/review/snapdragon-x-elite-linux-eoy... TL;DR: It runs, but not well, and performance has regressed since the last published benchmark.
      - paines 9mo ago
        Tuxedo is a german company relabling Clevo Laptops so far, which work out-of-the-box pretty good (I might say perfect in some cases) on Linux. They have done ZILCH, NADA, absolute nothing for Linux, besides promoting it as a brand. So now they took a snapdragon laptop, installed linux and are disappointed by the performance....Great test, tremendous work! Asahi Linux showed if you put in the work you can have awesome performance.
        array_key_first 9mo ago
        Yes but having to reverse engineer an entire platform from scratch is a big ask, and even with asahi it's taken many years and isn't up to snuff. Not to say anything of the team, they're truly miracle workers considering what they've been given to work with. But it's been the same story with ARM on windows now for at least a decade. The manufacturers just... do not give a single fuck. ARM is not comparable to x86 and will never be if ARM manufacturers continue to sabotage their own platform. It's not just Linux, either, these things are barely supported on Windows, run a fraction of the software, and don't run for very long. Ask anyone burned by ARM on windows attempts 1-100.
        g947o 9mo ago
        > if you put in the work you can have awesome performance. Then why would I pay money for a Qualcomm device just for more suffering? Unless I personally like tinkering or I am contributing to an open source project specifically for this, there is no way I would purchase a Qualcomm PC. Which is what the original comment is about.
        kllrnohj 9mo ago
        The original comment was "explicitly can't run Linux" which is explicitly not true. Not "it's not fully baked" or "it's not good", but a categorically unambiguously false claim of "explicitly can't run Linux" as if it was somehow firmware banned from doing so.
  - pjmlp 9mo ago
    Technical person that knows UNIX since being introduced to it via Xenix in 1993, and has used plenty of UNIX flavours since then. Some of us like the experience of Visual Studio, being able to do graphics development with modern graphics APIs that don't require a bazillion of code lines, with debuggers, not having to spend weekends trying to understand why yet again YouTube videos are not being hardware accelerated, scout for hardware that is supposed to work and then fails because the new firmaware update is no longer compatible,....
    - 999900000999 9mo ago
      Ok. But with an x86 device you can run Windows and Linux. With an Windows Arm device it's probably only going to work with Windows. It's not clear what real advantages Arm gives you here.
      - pjmlp 9mo ago
        That much I agree on, indeed.
    - g947o 9mo ago
      Your comment appears to address the question "why use Windows" (even though the answer doesn't really make sense to me), but that's not the question asked in GP. The question was "Why buy a Windows on ARM device"
      - pjmlp 9mo ago
        Ah, ok, that I really don't see the point. PCs aren't vertically integrated from a single vendor, and thus it isn't as if Microsoft alone can drag a whole ecosystem into ARM, even if the emulation would work out great. Windows NT was also multi-architecture, and eventually all variants died, because x86 was good enough, and when Itanium came to be, AMD got a workaround to keep x86 going forward. Even gaming doesn't work that great on Windows ARM.
        999900000999 9mo ago
- kllrnohj 9mo ago
  The Snapdragon Dev Kit is canceled. Snapdragon as a whole sure as hell isn't canceled, and Windows on Snapdragon isn't, either. There's loads of Windows laptops using Snapdragon with more continuing to release.
- motorpixel 9mo ago
  It's just the "dev kit". Snapdragon for the laptop form factor is alive and well. You don't need a devkit for a laptop running Windows and QCOM easily figured that out.
- cobalt 9mo ago
  you mean like the new generation they just announced? https://www.qualcomm.com/laptops/products/snapdragon-x2-elite https://www.qualcomm.com/laptops/products/snapdragon-x2-elit...
GaryBluto 9mo ago
Not that you are at fault here, but I'd be very hesitant to install any system updates so shortly after they brick my computer, especially when Microsoft is involved.
- g947o 9mo ago
  Or for an experimental device that has reached its EOL with no support for either software or hardware. I would just completely disable Windows Update, act as if the computer is already compromised, and only do work where security is not an issue. That's the most "reliable" way to keep it working. Of course, hindsight something something...
  - emeril 9mo ago
    having windows update running is already a compromise in some respects I haven't run windows update in like 20 years
llmslave2 9mo ago
[flagged]
- tom_ 9mo ago
  I used my desktop PC for the first time in a while yesterday, possibly the first time since doing the 25H2 update (but don't quote me on that), and noticed that the Windows 11 startup screen can't be dismissed. Previously, it's started by showing a screen the current time, which is still the case. Then I press a key, and it animates off, and there's the login prompt. But now? The animation never completes. It starts - and then snaps back to its initial state. Pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del gets the login box, so I'm not completely stuck. and I'm sure that was probably always the case. But I'm still a bit bemused by this. (Microsoft epithets have generally aged poorly, and I expect this one will be no exception, no matter how accurate it may currently actually be. See also: stuff like "Mickey$loth WinDOS")
  - llmslave2 9mo ago
    Idk, I still see Micro$oft used a lot. Maybe not on HN but HN in general being filled with tech employees is often more sympathetic to big tech companies. MS is betting hard on AI which has earned them this current moniker. If they keep doubling down on this bet I can see it sticking. I find it interesting that they renamed Office to Copilot, and HN has been pretty quiet about that. It's been clowned pretty hard on other sites. https://www.office.com/ https://www.office.com/
GranPC 9mo ago
Considering that you were seeing unpredictable behavior in the boot selector, with it randomly freezing, I would assume a hardware component (RAM?) kicked the bucket. If it were firmware corruption, it would consistently fail to present the menu, or wouldn't boot at all. Microsoft's code quality might not be at its peak right now, but blaming them for what's most likely a hardware fault isn't very productive IMO.
- ankurdhama 9mo ago
  So the "hardware failure" happening exactly at the same time the Windows update installation failed are not related? That sounds like a one in a billion kind of coincident.
  - eli 9mo ago
    An upgrade process involves heavy CPU use, disk read/writes, and at least a few power cycles in short time period. Depending what OP was doing on it otherwise, it could've been the highest temperature the device had ever seen. It's not so crazy. My guess would've been SSD failure, which would make sense to seem to appear after lots of writes. In the olden days I used to cross my fingers when rebooting spinning disk servers with very long uptimes because it was known there was a chance they wouldn't come back up even though they were running fine.
    - SecretDreams 9mo ago
      > Depending what OP was doing on it otherwise, it could've been the highest temperature the device had ever seen. It's not so crazy. Kind of big doubt. This was probably not slamming the hardware.
      - refulgentis 9mo ago
        That was absolutely slamming the hardware. (source: worked on Android, and GPs comments re: this are 100% correct. I’d need a bit more, well anything, to even come around to the idea the opposite is even plausible. Best steelman is naïvete, like “aren’t updates are just a few mvs and a reboot?”)
schmuckonwheels 9mo ago
Yeah they (probably) did not. Almost certainly a soft hardware failure, likely the SSD. I've run into a similar situation - except the culprit was Linux not Windows. Tossed the machine in a closet for a few months, when it miraculously started working again. Until it broke again a day and a half later. It's disk or RAM corruption. Give it up dude, it's the hardware, but let not an opportunity to smash Microsoft go unfulfilled.
- llmslave2 9mo ago
  Considering that when the problems started, many people online were having a similar issue I think it's unlikely it was a hardware failure.
  - bigyabai 9mo ago
    Or Microsoft deliberately bought shoddy RAM/SSDs, intending to force the bathtub curve down onto devkits they wanted dead ASAP.
    - wtallis 9mo ago
      The machine in question was not a Microsoft product, so they would not have been making decisions about component selection.
- geerlingguy 9mo ago
  From the article: > I opened the system and reseated everything, including the SSD. No change. I even tested the SSD in another machine to rule it out, and it’s fine too. But that doesn't mean it's not bad RAM, a bad SSD controller, who knows what... there are only a few of these boxes in the wild regardless, so it's unlikely it can be debugged :(
  - schmuckonwheels 9mo ago
    Hi, Jeff! Didn't realize the SSD was removable. Murphy's Law dictates the problem will always be in a soldered-down component whenever this happens.
byte_0 9mo ago
Not sure how much it could help, but is there a possibility you connect the SSD to another machine with the same architecture, run Windows install in it, then once Windows is installed and running, shut down, move the SSD back to the Snapdragon kit and attempt to boot? Just an idea...
petcat 9mo ago
I doubt this is a Windows issue. I would replace your ram sticks. I had a similar mysterious issue on an old Intel nuc. Got some new sticks off Amazon and never had the problem again
- geerlingguy 9mo ago
  Sadly it's one of the Arm Qualcomm Snapdragon boxes; none that I've seen offer replaceable RAM sticks.
  - smileybarry 9mo ago
    I recall one of the issues leading up to their abrupt cancellation was fulfillment, so I can't help but suspect there's some potential (long-term) issue they couldn't work out for this dev kit's chipset. Maybe some part of the chain was held together with glue and "this shouldn't fail but continue anyway" and whatever hardware issue eventually hit something critical. (And they intended to fix this some time after shipping, and gave up halfway through fulfillment)
ggm 9mo ago
Nobody has the time or energy to chase companies up for this stuff, and you know somewhere in the T&C they inserted a legal clause which is expensive to contest or un-contestable to liability. But, that said, it saddens me we've normalised "oh well" when it comes to kit. even dev kit. If MS can't manage release engineering to keep dev/test things alive, then it's not helpful to the belief they can do it for production things either. I inherited an IBM PC/RT back in the 90s. It was well outside what most people would consider its support lifetime. IBM could not have been more helpful working out how to keep it alive. I suspect this influences why when I later had some financial authority I was happier to buy thinkpad, than any other hardware we had available: I knew from experience they stood behind their maintenance guarantees. The device was configured to run BSD, not the IBM supported OS of the day, made no difference. It was end of life product line, made no difference. This was before Lenovo of course. But the point stands: people with positive support stories, keep that vendor in their top-set
arjie 9mo ago
These devices are nightmares. I'm sure things will pay off at some point but this feels like all those years where everyone was cursing Nvidia on Linux and praising AMD's dedication to open source but my computer would constantly lock up regardless until I switched to Nvidia. There was this massive disconnect between my experience and what everyone told me was best supported. Similarly, I'm constantly hearing about Qualcomm's renewed interest in Linux and this and that and how the X2 Elite will be fully supported but I have never known them to be like this. A decade or so ago we were trying to work for a school project on one of their dev kits and the documentation was so sparse. Then I see that the Snapdragon X Elite comes in this Ideacentre stuff but looking online no one has gotten Linux anywhere close to as good as Linux is on a Mac M2. That, for me, is the marker. If a Mac can run Linux better than whatever chipset you've released, it's just not hardware worth buying. If you're not Apple, you have to support Linux. Otherwise, to borrow Internet lingo, you're "deeply unserious".
blowsand 9mo ago
Completely off topic: the font on that site is quite readable and easy on the eyes and brain, the way the dyslexia font on the Kindle is.
- cratermoon 9mo ago
  It's Overlock https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Overlock https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Overlock
elzbardico 9mo ago
Man, it looks like a memory issue. Is the memory user replaceable on this machine?
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
10000truths 9mo ago
Sounds like this could potentially be some defective RAM. Memtest86 can boot from UEFI directly, so it should hopefully show up in BDS. A run should tell you what regions of RAM are bad, if any.
tgtweak 9mo ago
change the SSD and retry (the same ssd in another machine may not trigger the same error btw, this is not unilateral process of elimination) - those windows updates do a lot of disk writes and a small miss there can screw up an entire install since it shuffles things around in preboot environment (moving them on disk) and that can corrupt things and prevent a new install in the same way. You can also try to live boot into Ubuntu 25.04 arm64 since that iso has experimental snapdragon elite support and has some built-in drivers for storage and network - you can extract firmware from the windows drivers with qcom-firmware-extract - they recommend doing this from a windows partition which you should have (albeit possibly corrupted). If that still fails - you have a ram issue as others have pointed out. I've had the exact same symptoms (hardware instability after windows update) and it was nvme ssd (an early samsung one) and ram, in both instances. Not saying the windows update didn't also come with some junk firmware that got loaded into some of your devices, but that would be a distant diagnosis from ssd/ram (and many others would have seen the exact same thing during their update if it was that).
hamonrye 9mo ago
Cool. Running development for fork Ruby on Rails /src/ crates to match kit for enterprise-level software firmware recovery paths.
pdyc 9mo ago
are you able to stop at uefi stage and system is stable in bootloader stage? if yes than it may not be software issue. Others have covered checking ram and ssd. I suspect it could also be thermal or voltage issue.
wewewedxfgdf 9mo ago
We just bought a Snapdragon Windows device. I trust Microsoft 0% to keep developing Windows for it.
numpad0 9mo ago
Hopefully this serves as a reminder to decision makers with Web backgrounds to NOT push random non-critical _firmware_ updates without clear merit, or random updates in general. Security is not fluids. It doesn't naturally evaporate. So don't try to add like they're washer fluids. Those low-level software and associated hardware don't take software overwrites very well, even today. They might have total cumulative max overwrites, or manufacturer supplied update codes can still be dubious. It's (not)okay if you are meaning it to be a tool for your planned obsolescence strategy, otherwise, just don't touch it for the sake of doing it.
fortran77 9mo ago
THere's a chance that there was a hardware failure and _that's_ why the update was failing. And not a failed update that caused the hardware failure. Either way, may the memroy of your Snapdragon Dev Kit be a blessing.
ehnto 9mo ago
Only adding to this because it's likely a hardware failure, and I had a challenging time debugging a similar issue in an aftermarket engine ECU years ago. Thought it might make a fun anecdote. The car would run fine once started, but the car just wouldn't start sometimes (quite modified so I knew the systems well). The started would turn as that was a simple relay, but all ECU controlled devices wouldn't trigger. Plugging into the ECU, no error codes and all looked normal. Eventually we tracked the issue to some corruption in the ROM that was only getting read in certain circumstances, since the ECU stores maps for engine parameters based on things like pressure and temperature you might only hit the corrupted bits of a table in very specific circumstances. Reflashed the ROM and all was good afterwards. The suspected cause of corruption was intermittent power supply that had been fixed a while earlier.
danans 9mo ago
I was pleased to discover recently that Ubuntu is supporting my NVidia Jetson going forward after NVidias official support period ends: https://canonical.com/blog/ubuntu-now-officially-supports-nvidia-jetson-powering-the-future-of-ai-at-the-edge https://canonical.com/blog/ubuntu-now-officially-supports-nv... So there is at least one ARM devkit with long term Linux support.
- jogu 9mo ago
  Jetson is such a confusing product and it's difficult to tell exactly what they're supporting. Looking at the image download page it seems to be only Orin and newer? https://ubuntu.com/download/nvidia-jetson https://ubuntu.com/download/nvidia-jetson
  - danans 9mo ago
    Yeah. I have the Orin devkit
bbhjbhjbmnn 9mo ago
Soo.. Qualcomm can use a Windows drive to receive calibration data and other configurations. If you have a virus or something, you might brick a board, if its connected. We used 3-4 days in the factory to figure out why our boards were bricked. The PCs on the production line were all infected.
sedatk 9mo ago
As a data point, my Windows Dev Kit 2023 (also a Snapdragon) has been working great so far.
trvz 9mo ago
Seems like the typical Microsoft experience nowadays. My ROG Ally ran fine on Windows 11 at the beginning, but a year later always randomly crashed, even when idle, on a fresh OS install. After switching to SteamOS it runs stable again.
ChocolateGod 9mo ago
If it updated the UEFI it could be that somehow the UEFI now starts the hardware wrong (RAM setup maybe?) that causes it to be unstable.
nubskr 9mo ago
The holy trinity of modern hardware: update servers, firmware locks, and abandoned devkits
megous 9mo ago
If it's a proper devkit it should have accessible and documented test points for all voltage rails and should have come with a complete schematic. It should be possible to go through them with a voltmeter or oscilloscope and see if everything looks ok. Given the symptoms (random crashes not right away at boot), and given that qcom is anal about secure boot, my guess is that it's unlikely that it's a firmware (in SPI-NOR or wherever) corruption that initially caused this. Firmware is checked each boot. Might be as simple as degraded capacitor, or something similar. And I can imagine that it's not hard to destroy this kind of HW physically with a SW update. PMICs can often produce voltages way higher than Vmax of connected components. But it's unlikely that if bug like that happened, that it would only affect one devkit out there, and not a whole range of devices.
anonymousiam 9mo ago
After decades of experience, my normal practice is to make regular multi-generational backups of the entire disk (usually compressed). When something like this goes wrong, I can revert to the last known-good image and go from there. It saves a lot of time and trouble.
0xFFFC 9mo ago
That Snapdragon Kit you have was immediately recalled due to known issues. I read somewhere only a couple hundred ever shipped. I am one of the lucky ones to get one as well. If I were you I would get one of the Lenovo arm64 desktops and save what you have as a relic.

207 points by jasoneckert 9mo ago

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

Snapdragon is already canceled so I guess, they just don't care about this device. It's Microsoft on ARM. Sad to say, but don't expect full support or quality update on this. Ref: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrA2Xe9f7e8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrA2Xe9f7e8 - https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/qualcomm-snapdragon-dev-kit-windows-teardown-2024/ https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/qualcomm-snapdragon-d...

OptionOfT 9mo ago
No, the dev kit was cancelled. There are ARM laptops out there from multiple manufacturers, and there is a SnapDragon 2 on the horizon.
999900000999 9mo ago
I wanted to order one of these and then Qualcomm cancelled it. Then I knew Windows ARM probably wasn't going to make it. Why any technical person would want a PC( not including Macs)that explicitly can't run Linux I'll never know.
- kllrnohj 9mo ago
  > Why any technical person would want a PC that explicitly can't run Linux I'll never know. Huh? https://www.phoronix.com/review/snapdragon-x1e-september https://www.phoronix.com/review/snapdragon-x1e-september
  - theevilsharpie 9mo ago
    More recent revisit: https://www.phoronix.com/review/snapdragon-x-elite-linux-eoy2025 https://www.phoronix.com/review/snapdragon-x-elite-linux-eoy... TL;DR: It runs, but not well, and performance has regressed since the last published benchmark.
    - paines 9mo ago
      Tuxedo is a german company relabling Clevo Laptops so far, which work out-of-the-box pretty good (I might say perfect in some cases) on Linux. They have done ZILCH, NADA, absolute nothing for Linux, besides promoting it as a brand. So now they took a snapdragon laptop, installed linux and are disappointed by the performance....Great test, tremendous work! Asahi Linux showed if you put in the work you can have awesome performance.
      - array_key_first 9mo ago
        Yes but having to reverse engineer an entire platform from scratch is a big ask, and even with asahi it's taken many years and isn't up to snuff. Not to say anything of the team, they're truly miracle workers considering what they've been given to work with. But it's been the same story with ARM on windows now for at least a decade. The manufacturers just... do not give a single fuck. ARM is not comparable to x86 and will never be if ARM manufacturers continue to sabotage their own platform. It's not just Linux, either, these things are barely supported on Windows, run a fraction of the software, and don't run for very long. Ask anyone burned by ARM on windows attempts 1-100.
      - g947o 9mo ago
        > if you put in the work you can have awesome performance. Then why would I pay money for a Qualcomm device just for more suffering? Unless I personally like tinkering or I am contributing to an open source project specifically for this, there is no way I would purchase a Qualcomm PC. Which is what the original comment is about.
        kllrnohj 9mo ago
        The original comment was "explicitly can't run Linux" which is explicitly not true. Not "it's not fully baked" or "it's not good", but a categorically unambiguously false claim of "explicitly can't run Linux" as if it was somehow firmware banned from doing so.
- pjmlp 9mo ago
  Technical person that knows UNIX since being introduced to it via Xenix in 1993, and has used plenty of UNIX flavours since then. Some of us like the experience of Visual Studio, being able to do graphics development with modern graphics APIs that don't require a bazillion of code lines, with debuggers, not having to spend weekends trying to understand why yet again YouTube videos are not being hardware accelerated, scout for hardware that is supposed to work and then fails because the new firmaware update is no longer compatible,....
  - 999900000999 9mo ago
    Ok. But with an x86 device you can run Windows and Linux. With an Windows Arm device it's probably only going to work with Windows. It's not clear what real advantages Arm gives you here.
    - pjmlp 9mo ago
      That much I agree on, indeed.
  - g947o 9mo ago
    Your comment appears to address the question "why use Windows" (even though the answer doesn't really make sense to me), but that's not the question asked in GP. The question was "Why buy a Windows on ARM device"
    - pjmlp 9mo ago
      Ah, ok, that I really don't see the point. PCs aren't vertically integrated from a single vendor, and thus it isn't as if Microsoft alone can drag a whole ecosystem into ARM, even if the emulation would work out great. Windows NT was also multi-architecture, and eventually all variants died, because x86 was good enough, and when Itanium came to be, AMD got a workaround to keep x86 going forward. Even gaming doesn't work that great on Windows ARM.
      - 999900000999 9mo ago
kllrnohj 9mo ago
The Snapdragon Dev Kit is canceled. Snapdragon as a whole sure as hell isn't canceled, and Windows on Snapdragon isn't, either. There's loads of Windows laptops using Snapdragon with more continuing to release.
motorpixel 9mo ago
It's just the "dev kit". Snapdragon for the laptop form factor is alive and well. You don't need a devkit for a laptop running Windows and QCOM easily figured that out.
cobalt 9mo ago
you mean like the new generation they just announced? https://www.qualcomm.com/laptops/products/snapdragon-x2-elite https://www.qualcomm.com/laptops/products/snapdragon-x2-elit...

GaryBluto 9mo ago

Not that you are at fault here, but I'd be very hesitant to install any system updates so shortly after they brick my computer, especially when Microsoft is involved.

g947o 9mo ago
Or for an experimental device that has reached its EOL with no support for either software or hardware. I would just completely disable Windows Update, act as if the computer is already compromised, and only do work where security is not an issue. That's the most "reliable" way to keep it working. Of course, hindsight something something...
- emeril 9mo ago
  having windows update running is already a compromise in some respects I haven't run windows update in like 20 years

llmslave2 9mo ago

[flagged]

tom_ 9mo ago
I used my desktop PC for the first time in a while yesterday, possibly the first time since doing the 25H2 update (but don't quote me on that), and noticed that the Windows 11 startup screen can't be dismissed. Previously, it's started by showing a screen the current time, which is still the case. Then I press a key, and it animates off, and there's the login prompt. But now? The animation never completes. It starts - and then snaps back to its initial state. Pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del gets the login box, so I'm not completely stuck. and I'm sure that was probably always the case. But I'm still a bit bemused by this. (Microsoft epithets have generally aged poorly, and I expect this one will be no exception, no matter how accurate it may currently actually be. See also: stuff like "Mickey$loth WinDOS")
- llmslave2 9mo ago
  Idk, I still see Micro$oft used a lot. Maybe not on HN but HN in general being filled with tech employees is often more sympathetic to big tech companies. MS is betting hard on AI which has earned them this current moniker. If they keep doubling down on this bet I can see it sticking. I find it interesting that they renamed Office to Copilot, and HN has been pretty quiet about that. It's been clowned pretty hard on other sites. https://www.office.com/ https://www.office.com/

GranPC 9mo ago

Considering that you were seeing unpredictable behavior in the boot selector, with it randomly freezing, I would assume a hardware component (RAM?) kicked the bucket. If it were firmware corruption, it would consistently fail to present the menu, or wouldn't boot at all. Microsoft's code quality might not be at its peak right now, but blaming them for what's most likely a hardware fault isn't very productive IMO.

ankurdhama 9mo ago
So the "hardware failure" happening exactly at the same time the Windows update installation failed are not related? That sounds like a one in a billion kind of coincident.
- eli 9mo ago
  An upgrade process involves heavy CPU use, disk read/writes, and at least a few power cycles in short time period. Depending what OP was doing on it otherwise, it could've been the highest temperature the device had ever seen. It's not so crazy. My guess would've been SSD failure, which would make sense to seem to appear after lots of writes. In the olden days I used to cross my fingers when rebooting spinning disk servers with very long uptimes because it was known there was a chance they wouldn't come back up even though they were running fine.
  - SecretDreams 9mo ago
    > Depending what OP was doing on it otherwise, it could've been the highest temperature the device had ever seen. It's not so crazy. Kind of big doubt. This was probably not slamming the hardware.
    - refulgentis 9mo ago
      That was absolutely slamming the hardware. (source: worked on Android, and GPs comments re: this are 100% correct. I’d need a bit more, well anything, to even come around to the idea the opposite is even plausible. Best steelman is naïvete, like “aren’t updates are just a few mvs and a reboot?”)

schmuckonwheels 9mo ago

Yeah they (probably) did not. Almost certainly a soft hardware failure, likely the SSD. I've run into a similar situation - except the culprit was Linux not Windows. Tossed the machine in a closet for a few months, when it miraculously started working again. Until it broke again a day and a half later. It's disk or RAM corruption. Give it up dude, it's the hardware, but let not an opportunity to smash Microsoft go unfulfilled.

llmslave2 9mo ago
Considering that when the problems started, many people online were having a similar issue I think it's unlikely it was a hardware failure.
- bigyabai 9mo ago
  Or Microsoft deliberately bought shoddy RAM/SSDs, intending to force the bathtub curve down onto devkits they wanted dead ASAP.
  - wtallis 9mo ago
    The machine in question was not a Microsoft product, so they would not have been making decisions about component selection.
geerlingguy 9mo ago
From the article: > I opened the system and reseated everything, including the SSD. No change. I even tested the SSD in another machine to rule it out, and it’s fine too. But that doesn't mean it's not bad RAM, a bad SSD controller, who knows what... there are only a few of these boxes in the wild regardless, so it's unlikely it can be debugged :(
- schmuckonwheels 9mo ago
  Hi, Jeff! Didn't realize the SSD was removable. Murphy's Law dictates the problem will always be in a soldered-down component whenever this happens.

byte_0 9mo ago

Not sure how much it could help, but is there a possibility you connect the SSD to another machine with the same architecture, run Windows install in it, then once Windows is installed and running, shut down, move the SSD back to the Snapdragon kit and attempt to boot? Just an idea...

petcat 9mo ago

I doubt this is a Windows issue. I would replace your ram sticks. I had a similar mysterious issue on an old Intel nuc. Got some new sticks off Amazon and never had the problem again

geerlingguy 9mo ago
Sadly it's one of the Arm Qualcomm Snapdragon boxes; none that I've seen offer replaceable RAM sticks.
- smileybarry 9mo ago
  I recall one of the issues leading up to their abrupt cancellation was fulfillment, so I can't help but suspect there's some potential (long-term) issue they couldn't work out for this dev kit's chipset. Maybe some part of the chain was held together with glue and "this shouldn't fail but continue anyway" and whatever hardware issue eventually hit something critical. (And they intended to fix this some time after shipping, and gave up halfway through fulfillment)

ggm 9mo ago

Nobody has the time or energy to chase companies up for this stuff, and you know somewhere in the T&C they inserted a legal clause which is expensive to contest or un-contestable to liability. But, that said, it saddens me we've normalised "oh well" when it comes to kit. even dev kit. If MS can't manage release engineering to keep dev/test things alive, then it's not helpful to the belief they can do it for production things either. I inherited an IBM PC/RT back in the 90s. It was well outside what most people would consider its support lifetime. IBM could not have been more helpful working out how to keep it alive. I suspect this influences why when I later had some financial authority I was happier to buy thinkpad, than any other hardware we had available: I knew from experience they stood behind their maintenance guarantees. The device was configured to run BSD, not the IBM supported OS of the day, made no difference. It was end of life product line, made no difference. This was before Lenovo of course. But the point stands: people with positive support stories, keep that vendor in their top-set

arjie 9mo ago

These devices are nightmares. I'm sure things will pay off at some point but this feels like all those years where everyone was cursing Nvidia on Linux and praising AMD's dedication to open source but my computer would constantly lock up regardless until I switched to Nvidia. There was this massive disconnect between my experience and what everyone told me was best supported. Similarly, I'm constantly hearing about Qualcomm's renewed interest in Linux and this and that and how the X2 Elite will be fully supported but I have never known them to be like this. A decade or so ago we were trying to work for a school project on one of their dev kits and the documentation was so sparse. Then I see that the Snapdragon X Elite comes in this Ideacentre stuff but looking online no one has gotten Linux anywhere close to as good as Linux is on a Mac M2. That, for me, is the marker. If a Mac can run Linux better than whatever chipset you've released, it's just not hardware worth buying. If you're not Apple, you have to support Linux. Otherwise, to borrow Internet lingo, you're "deeply unserious".

blowsand 9mo ago

Completely off topic: the font on that site is quite readable and easy on the eyes and brain, the way the dyslexia font on the Kindle is.

cratermoon 9mo ago
It's Overlock https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Overlock https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Overlock

elzbardico 9mo ago

Man, it looks like a memory issue. Is the memory user replaceable on this machine?

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]

10000truths 9mo ago

Sounds like this could potentially be some defective RAM. Memtest86 can boot from UEFI directly, so it should hopefully show up in BDS. A run should tell you what regions of RAM are bad, if any.

tgtweak 9mo ago

change the SSD and retry (the same ssd in another machine may not trigger the same error btw, this is not unilateral process of elimination) - those windows updates do a lot of disk writes and a small miss there can screw up an entire install since it shuffles things around in preboot environment (moving them on disk) and that can corrupt things and prevent a new install in the same way. You can also try to live boot into Ubuntu 25.04 arm64 since that iso has experimental snapdragon elite support and has some built-in drivers for storage and network - you can extract firmware from the windows drivers with qcom-firmware-extract - they recommend doing this from a windows partition which you should have (albeit possibly corrupted). If that still fails - you have a ram issue as others have pointed out. I've had the exact same symptoms (hardware instability after windows update) and it was nvme ssd (an early samsung one) and ram, in both instances. Not saying the windows update didn't also come with some junk firmware that got loaded into some of your devices, but that would be a distant diagnosis from ssd/ram (and many others would have seen the exact same thing during their update if it was that).

hamonrye 9mo ago

Cool. Running development for fork Ruby on Rails /src/ crates to match kit for enterprise-level software firmware recovery paths.

pdyc 9mo ago

are you able to stop at uefi stage and system is stable in bootloader stage? if yes than it may not be software issue. Others have covered checking ram and ssd. I suspect it could also be thermal or voltage issue.

wewewedxfgdf 9mo ago

We just bought a Snapdragon Windows device. I trust Microsoft 0% to keep developing Windows for it.

numpad0 9mo ago

Hopefully this serves as a reminder to decision makers with Web backgrounds to NOT push random non-critical _firmware_ updates without clear merit, or random updates in general. Security is not fluids. It doesn't naturally evaporate. So don't try to add like they're washer fluids. Those low-level software and associated hardware don't take software overwrites very well, even today. They might have total cumulative max overwrites, or manufacturer supplied update codes can still be dubious. It's (not)okay if you are meaning it to be a tool for your planned obsolescence strategy, otherwise, just don't touch it for the sake of doing it.

fortran77 9mo ago

THere's a chance that there was a hardware failure and _that's_ why the update was failing. And not a failed update that caused the hardware failure. Either way, may the memroy of your Snapdragon Dev Kit be a blessing.

ehnto 9mo ago

Only adding to this because it's likely a hardware failure, and I had a challenging time debugging a similar issue in an aftermarket engine ECU years ago. Thought it might make a fun anecdote. The car would run fine once started, but the car just wouldn't start sometimes (quite modified so I knew the systems well). The started would turn as that was a simple relay, but all ECU controlled devices wouldn't trigger. Plugging into the ECU, no error codes and all looked normal. Eventually we tracked the issue to some corruption in the ROM that was only getting read in certain circumstances, since the ECU stores maps for engine parameters based on things like pressure and temperature you might only hit the corrupted bits of a table in very specific circumstances. Reflashed the ROM and all was good afterwards. The suspected cause of corruption was intermittent power supply that had been fixed a while earlier.

danans 9mo ago

I was pleased to discover recently that Ubuntu is supporting my NVidia Jetson going forward after NVidias official support period ends: https://canonical.com/blog/ubuntu-now-officially-supports-nvidia-jetson-powering-the-future-of-ai-at-the-edge https://canonical.com/blog/ubuntu-now-officially-supports-nv... So there is at least one ARM devkit with long term Linux support.

jogu 9mo ago
Jetson is such a confusing product and it's difficult to tell exactly what they're supporting. Looking at the image download page it seems to be only Orin and newer? https://ubuntu.com/download/nvidia-jetson https://ubuntu.com/download/nvidia-jetson
- danans 9mo ago
  Yeah. I have the Orin devkit

bbhjbhjbmnn 9mo ago

Soo.. Qualcomm can use a Windows drive to receive calibration data and other configurations. If you have a virus or something, you might brick a board, if its connected. We used 3-4 days in the factory to figure out why our boards were bricked. The PCs on the production line were all infected.

sedatk 9mo ago

As a data point, my Windows Dev Kit 2023 (also a Snapdragon) has been working great so far.

trvz 9mo ago

Seems like the typical Microsoft experience nowadays. My ROG Ally ran fine on Windows 11 at the beginning, but a year later always randomly crashed, even when idle, on a fresh OS install. After switching to SteamOS it runs stable again.

ChocolateGod 9mo ago

If it updated the UEFI it could be that somehow the UEFI now starts the hardware wrong (RAM setup maybe?) that causes it to be unstable.

nubskr 9mo ago

The holy trinity of modern hardware: update servers, firmware locks, and abandoned devkits

megous 9mo ago

If it's a proper devkit it should have accessible and documented test points for all voltage rails and should have come with a complete schematic. It should be possible to go through them with a voltmeter or oscilloscope and see if everything looks ok. Given the symptoms (random crashes not right away at boot), and given that qcom is anal about secure boot, my guess is that it's unlikely that it's a firmware (in SPI-NOR or wherever) corruption that initially caused this. Firmware is checked each boot. Might be as simple as degraded capacitor, or something similar. And I can imagine that it's not hard to destroy this kind of HW physically with a SW update. PMICs can often produce voltages way higher than Vmax of connected components. But it's unlikely that if bug like that happened, that it would only affect one devkit out there, and not a whole range of devices.

anonymousiam 9mo ago

After decades of experience, my normal practice is to make regular multi-generational backups of the entire disk (usually compressed). When something like this goes wrong, I can revert to the last known-good image and go from there. It saves a lot of time and trouble.

0xFFFC 9mo ago

That Snapdragon Kit you have was immediately recalled due to known issues. I read somewhere only a couple hundred ever shipped. I am one of the lucky ones to get one as well. If I were you I would get one of the Lenovo arm64 desktops and save what you have as a relic.