Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get Windows 10 update installed • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by masto » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 12:51 PM UTC

swells34 wrote: post #158

masto wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your experience differs from mine. If I only count major incidents, I've had at least two occasions where a Linux operating system update completely hosed my system. One was a Rackspace VPS I never managed to recover, I had to use their management tools to download a binary image of the unbootable disk and fuss around to mount it and get my files off so I could build a new server. I'm very hesitant to touch Linux upd…

That's quite strange. What distro? For a while I was managing several hundred Linux devices remotely, so I've done thousands of updates with no issues. Linux has been my daily driver for 15 years, and never had an update issue there (that I didn't create myself). Specifically the thing I've NEVER had an issue with was a standard system update. Apt upgrade, pacman or yay -SYU, things of that nature. Had plenty of prob…

In answer to the question, no, I did not forget to mention that I did anything "weird". It was apt-get upgrade.

I'm not going to have an argument about my personal experience. You can find plenty of others in the comments who have had similar problems. I enjoyed the response, as I've been joking for 20+ years that 95% of the time Linux advocates will tell anyone running into issues "you're using the wrong distro".

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

#222

Post by JoeAltmaier » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 1:16 PM UTC

swells34 wrote: post #208

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might be a bit of hyperbole. Microsoft had extensive documentation of nearly every API they support, and some they don't. Comprehensive documentation with notes and caveats. Automatically available from their tools. Compare, for instance, with Apples almost total non-documentation of anything. Mostly just scraped comments with arguments barely described e.g 'a string'. No notes, no architecture, nothing.

Yes, my comment contained more hyperbole than it should have; I was frustrated at the idea of "hiding information about a problem" as a good design goal, and let that frustration influence my writing. Apologies to jstummbillig for that. Thank you for being the voice of reason in the room, Joe. Interesting, I've never found Microsoft documentation for Windows thorough enough to reason about a problem, especially when…

Yeah Microsoft is definitely not much better than a walled garden for much of their technology.

I was privileged(?) to have access to source under license for years, contracting with a company that ported Windows to various industrial platforms. So my view is similarly colored.

Linux is definitely the king, no argument there.

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

#223

Post by smileybarry » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 5:18 PM UTC

londons_explore wrote: post #22

smileybarry wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC WinRE asks for a local administrator password before doing any recovery operations, no? Also, this is one of the reasons why "auto unlock" is generally a huge asterisk and PIN/password/network unlock are recommended instead, if possible. (Though they do force you to be a laptop nanny during update times and unlock it on every restart...)

> WinRE asks for a local administrator password before doing any recovery operations, no? Not for the "Shift+F10" command prompt option....

Are you sure the system drive you see is the real drive and not just the bootable WinRE partition? You technically have two "?:\Windows" roots in that state, one of WinRE that just booted and one of the system you're restoring.