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Microsoft's first cumulative update for Windows 10 - KB3081424 - is causing havoc for some users. How do I know this? Because I spent a good part of my Sunday morning dealing with it, that's how.
The problem, in a nutshell, is that the update puts affected systems into an endless crash loop. The update tries to install, gets to a certain point, fails, and then displays the unhelpful "We couldn't complete the updates, undoing the changes."
If it stopped there things wouldn't be too bad, but because Microsoft now forces updates onto Windows 10 users, the OS kept trying - and failing - to install the update, which in turn placed the system into a periodic crash/reboot loop that put quite a dent in my productivity.
To make matters worse, the tool that Microsoft released to hide or block toxic Windows 10 updates (as reported by my ZDNet colleague Ed Bott) didn't allow me to prevent this update from attempting to install. So I was forced to either abandon the machine until a fix was made available or try to fix it myself.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-cumulative-update-causes-reboot-loop-havoc-for-some-users/
Submitted from IRC.
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Tuesday August 11 2015, @11:45AM
I've had hardware trouble because some of the few things I still use windows for is stuff like USB eprom/flash burners and semi-exotic radio hardware (freq synthesizers and programming radios and stuff).
That's not a printer port or a serial port, not as simple as telling WINE to talk to /dev/ttyUSB0 as COM1 or whatever. Maybe the piracy encouraging (because its easier to warez a copy than to use the legal dongle) dongles will get support in WINE and that'll help use weird USB hardware on WINE. I've been hearing that for over a decade of course.
I have many removable drive trays and two shelves in the tower. Set the bios to only boot off the first SATA port never the second. Then just swap around the trays around as appropriate and backup the tiny little windows drive using freebsd and stash it on the network for safe keeping etc.
Drive trays are fun. I have my normal daily driver freebsd for day to day work, a linux mostly used for minecraft FTB launcher and occasional legacy experiments, a windows steam only gaming drive which I rely on steam to backup, and a windows weird hardware support only drive which I actually do backup. I have a couple other trays with drives in them for various experiments of various level of permanence. I can boot off any of those or stick any of them in as a secondary drive and mess with it from the main OS. Its actually been awhile since I've backed up the windows hardware drive, months now, I should take a look at that...
Maybe 20 years ago I was dual booting but as soon as I could afford trays I went tray because there's no way for windows to F up the linux partition or bootloader if the linux partition is on a shelf powered down a yard away, for example. Also its cheaper (usually) to buy half a dozen smaller drives than to buy one drive six times as big as "normal" capacity. Once you go tray, you don't go back. I had maybe a dozen PATA trays (and shelves) at one time and ended up tossing them all out for the SATA upgrade. Now that the world is all 2.5 inch SSD instead of larger rotating rust so I "could" toss my last rotating drives and upgrade again to smaller trays, but I'm not terribly motivated to spend the money to accomplish nothing.
This is just my main desktop. I have two secondary machines also on my desk that only run freebsd and do ZFS RAID across two SSDs, etc. Stereotypically I'll have a web browser on the machine to my left, an editor or some app on the center and a command line to the right. I do experiment with CBSD clustering and I honestly can't remember which network services are running on which desktop. My poor basement fileserver is getting lonely, gradually running out of things to do other than be a giant fileserver / mythtv backend.
Anyway I haven't found a better solution yet and am somewhat interested if anyone can top this.