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Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get Windows 10 update installed

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Re: Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get Windows 10 update installed

#141

Post by toast0 »

squarefoot wrote: post #46

FTA: "Showing an unhelpful error message and then requiring a user to delve into the world of the command line to fix things. What is this? Linux?" What did the author want, a button to push for each solution to every possible exotic error, even critical ones that would require to resize a system partition from a running OS? Seriously!? Of course one solve this through the command line. Or, if that wasn't what the au…

> even critical ones that would require to resize a system partition from a running OS?

Windows updates can usually do this actually. But only if the recovery partition is after the system partition. On my systems that have been around for a while and had a recovery partition in the front of the drive (as used to be common), there's often a handful of recovery partitions, because the original one was too small, so some update made a new one at the end, and then that one was too small and another update made another one at the end. Kind of messy... and hard to cleanup, I don't think many filesystems are easy to extend or reduce from the front of the partition.

Re: Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get Windows 10 update installed

#142

Post by 1970-01-01 »

squarefoot wrote: post #46

FTA: "Showing an unhelpful error message and then requiring a user to delve into the world of the command line to fix things. What is this? Linux?" What did the author want, a button to push for each solution to every possible exotic error, even critical ones that would require to resize a system partition from a running OS? Seriously!? Of course one solve this through the command line. Or, if that wasn't what the au…

Lots of small software companies existed from the 95-XP era to do exactly this, to fix errors such as missing paths or dll issues for major updates and upgrades. Seems like Windows Update is ripe for supervision again.

Re: Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get Windows 10 update installed

#143

Post by rimunroe »

JeffSnazz wrote: post #139
rimunroe wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't tend towards expressing personal comparisons "in public" since they seem both inevitable regardless of the situation and disrespectful to bring up as a topic of interest—not to mention potentially exposing you as incompetent yourself. I guess not everyone else feels the same way. > Hell, I'm free now! Everyone I've ever worked with sucks donkey-dick for not coding how I do! I read it as "extra vigilant ...…

> I don't think it's putting down other people you've worked with, holding yourself up as some paragon, OR belittling your own abilities. People tend to focus on the happy path. It's good to be aware of that and try to correct it. It doesn't require or imply thinking poorly of other people. My experience definitely counters your own!

Could you elaborate? I've seen this tendency (or an acknowledgement of it) in even the best people I've worked with, ones who are far better programmers than me. I've spent a lot of my career primarily pair programming, so I've had ample opportunity to talk with them about stuff like this explicitly.

Re: Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get Windows 10 update installed

#144

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

hknmtt wrote: post #36

i remember reading years ago about the reason windows updates since 8 or 10 were so bad was because MS fired all testers and scrapped their testing hardware and now they are testing virtually in cloud. I guess nothing has changed, still. cost cutting at its best.

> MS fired all testers and scrapped their testing hardware and now they are testing virtually in cloud.

I'm fairly certain this isn't the case. 1) Microsoft still adds Microsoft drivers for hardware; this implies having hardware and people to work with it. 2) Microsoft has a massive base of corp and gov customers buying hosting, surveillance, etc. Widespread issues with Windows would could affect that.

I'll go out on a limb and guess the fired all testers theory arose when the insider program became widely available to the public.

Re: Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get Windows 10 update installed

#145

Post by JeffSnazz »

rimunroe wrote: post #143
JeffSnazz wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think it's putting down other people you've worked with, holding yourself up as some paragon, OR belittling your own abilities. People tend to focus on the happy path. It's good to be aware of that and try to correct it. It doesn't require or imply thinking poorly of other people. My experience definitely counters your own!

Could you elaborate? I've seen this tendency (or an acknowledgement of it) in even the best people I've worked with, ones who are far better programmers than me. I've spent a lot of my career primarily pair programming, so I've had ample opportunity to talk with them about stuff like this explicitly.

What matters is the structure of the program per se. The entire concept of the happy or error path is a cultural phenomenon that requires explicit acknowledgment and rejection to solve (excepting languages that demand error-handling to function)

In my experience, these metaphors are introduced to meet time constraints and produce shitty software.

It's fine to talk about these metaphors as efficiency-accelerants, but they don't produce quality software. Not that there are many companies trying to do that these days.

Re: Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get Windows 10 update installed

#146

Post by toast0 »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #57
hknmtt wrote: post #36

i remember reading years ago about the reason windows updates since 8 or 10 were so bad was because MS fired all testers and scrapped their testing hardware and now they are testing virtually in cloud. I guess nothing has changed, still. cost cutting at its best.

>MS fired all testers and scrapped their testing hardware and now they are testing virtually in cloud Do you have any sources for this? AFAIK, according to the LTT wan show when he was duiscussing his conversation with MS baout Windows sleep issues, he laerned MS still uses plenty of bare metal HW for testing, especailly notebooks and in no way got rid of it.

The status quo was seperate software developers and software developers in test, and nearly equal numbers [1] (I haven't read this book, only the description, but seems authoritative).

The new normal changed around 2014, as described in this Ars Technica article [2]. In order to ship more stuff, more quickly, Microsoft eliminated the developer in test roles, removing the bottleneck of a specific role in charge of quality and hoping to diffuse the responsibility.

This addresses the 'fired all testers' part of your quote. I don't have references on the 'scrapped their testing hardware', but I imagine most testing hardware was maintained by developers in test, and when their positions were eliminated, they may not have had anyone to transfer the hardware to.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/How-We-Test-Software-Microsoft/dp/073...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/How-We-Test-Software-Microsoft/dp/073...

Re: Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get Windows 10 update installed

#147

Post by eviks »

jug wrote: post #17

Haha! Yes, this was a mess! I was called to help my concerned stepson with "an update error" this past weekend. I'm a software engineer but even I kind of balked at it at first, realizing how very easily an on-the-fly resizing of partitions can go wrong! Let's take it from the beginning. He pointed me to the "out of disk space" error code, which isn't in text form to begin with, but only something you find out by goo…

You've skippedd to the tough spot, but before that - actually, why is 300mb not enough?

Re: Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get Windows 10 update installed

#148

Post by bdhcuidbebe »

robotbikes wrote: post #13
bdhcuidbebe wrote: post #2

The issue is the recovery partition is missing or not large enough. Since I dont need a recovery partition in my win10 vm, i deleted it after installation and can now no longer update my installation.

I followed the instructions to disable the recovery partition as I don't think I had allocated any space to it and upon reboot I was able to upgrade to Windows 11 and hopefully I didn't create any further problems down the road. I really didn't want to mess around with resizing my system partition as the instructions alluded to as the next step. I guess YMMV but I find it amusing that this random bug I ran into is on…

ok but i dont want win11 :) just keeping an installation around for gaming

the reason its on here is that many was affected i guess

Re: Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get Windows 10 update installed

#149

Post by swells34 »

jstummbillig wrote: post #136
swells34 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, the classic "if I can't see the bad thing, it doesn't exist" approach to problem solving.

Different design goals. While there's tension between Windows/Linux (which, interestingly, has over the years partly been released by each adopting pages of the others' playbook) there are a lot of complex or critical systems in the world, where displaying an error message to the user is clearly not a great design choice.

Yes, and some people just want to take their car to the mechanic, while other people want to fix theirs. It's a classic struggle in any area. The big difference though, is if I use my car in a professional capacity, I want to know how to change my own oil, because I'm not an idiot. I want to be able to fix simple issues, because that's just being professionally responsible.

Windows discourages this kind of professional responsibility, hides everything it can that would give you an inkling of what's going on under the hood. Microsoft wants you to be dependent on them for doing ANYTHING out of the ordinary. And of course, when anything out of the ordinary occurs, there is wailing and gnashing of teeth from millions of windows users, billions of dollars lost by their employers, and all the Linux users just stare in disbelief that y'all don't know how to change your own oil. If you use a computer for work, should probably know how it works. Microsoft has intentionally made it difficult, so... Have you tried Linux, the backbone of modern computing, installed on more devices than Windows by at least a factor of two?

Re: Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get Windows 10 update installed

#150

Post by rimunroe »

JeffSnazz wrote: post #145
rimunroe wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate? I've seen this tendency (or an acknowledgement of it) in even the best people I've worked with, ones who are far better programmers than me. I've spent a lot of my career primarily pair programming, so I've had ample opportunity to talk with them about stuff like this explicitly.

What matters is the structure of the program per se. The entire concept of the happy or error path is a cultural phenomenon that requires explicit acknowledgment and rejection to solve (excepting languages that demand error-handling to function) In my experience, these metaphors are introduced to meet time constraints and produce shitty software. It's fine to talk about these metaphors as efficiency-accelerants, but…

I think you're wrong on this. How often does software get created without the creator having a primary goal in mind? How often is the main goal handling things going wrong? If I write something to build a chart out of some logs, the first, most basic thing I'm going to evaluate it on is "can it make the chart?", not "how does it handle a malformed log entry?". I will think about these things, but they're inarguably not the first thing (the happy path) I think about when I think about the purpose of the code as a whole.
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