Early xmas present from Windows Update: INACCESSIBLE BOOT DEVICE

No idea how widespread this problem will be, or which specific patch caused the problem, but those of you who are Windows users may want to be a bit cautious about installing updates for the next few days.

Windows was unable to automatically recover the system, various commands which show up in search results (e.g. bootrec /scanos) failed to find any valid Windows installs (even though the drive is fine and the Windows folder is still there), and DISM fails to revert the updates because it thinks it’s already in the middle of something else (CBS_E_EXCLUSIVE_WOULD_MERGE) or because “failed to find a matching version for servicing stack”, so I’ve fallen back to doing a full-disk restore from a backup.

It’s a good thing I finally started doing regular automated backups a couple of months ago.

Joy to the World! Indeed.

Thanks for the heads up. I have had that festive teeshirt twice in the last two years. One was a brand new SSD failure, and the other was Windows Update.

Thanks to backups and a Linux live boot disc; all was resolved and recovered

Welcome to the world of untested sub-alpha quality forced updates on Windows 10/11.

Welcome to the world of untested sub-alpha quality forced updates on Windows 10/11.

AFAIK, all these recent years messed up updates for W10 are due to the fact that M$ migrated most of QA activities to VM/Cloud based testing, so, their test cases are indeed not all-encompassing anymore…

I’ve not seen any evidence they turned up on Azure.

I’ve not seen any evidence they turned up on Azure.

When Microsoft laid off most of their testing team there were a lot of articles on the matter. Anyway here there is a link to a youtube video made by an ex MS employee that worked at testing W10.

He explains the issues with the new testing process Microsoft has implemented (heavy based on using VMs).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9kn8_oztsA

Test automation using VMs works really well for a lot of scenarios, but not for all scenarios, which is why there are this quite constant inconsistent behaviors experienced by users (in this case Jeffrey), while, for example, in my case the upgrade went flawlessly and I never had issues from W10 upgrades.

I have to say that I always run the following commands before doing any Windows update:

chkdsk /f c:
chkdsk /r c:

sfc /scannow

dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /CheckHealth 

So the update always finds the machine in a state that is as close as possible to MS test VMs. Maybe this will help others, be careful running the commands above and make sure you always have backup first! :)

[edit] IIRC, MS Layoff of their QA team was part of the transition of MS to DevOps and using test automation [/edit]

No idea how widespread this problem will be, or which specific patch caused the problem, but those of you who are Windows users may want to be a bit cautious about installing updates for the next few days.

There is one rule when an update process goes wrong: power on the computer and wait. Windows 10 can take up to 48 hours to solve the problem and go back to normal state (once, it took 3 days here). But if you try to ‘repair’ the system while it’s in the middle of an automatic remediation process, it can simply break everything.

The latest Windows 10 update is reported to have some problems on the PC of a few of my clients. I told them to wait, and the PC managed to solve the problem and boot normally after one to two days.

In this case it wouldn’t surprise me if the automated repair process is what caused the INACCESSIBLE BOOT DEVICE error.

For the past year or more the PC has regularly been crashing on boot after installing some windows updates, causing it to automatically uninstall the update. So it’s possible that it installed the update, crashed on boot, tried uninstalling it, but wasn’t unable to uninstall it properly and broke things further (I wasn’t paying attention to the machine at the time, I just came back to it ~20 mins after starting the update to see it sulking on the BSOD).

After trying to reinstall the update today and getting the usual page fault error, I installed a crash dump viewer and started to do my own investigation. Apparently only the windows kernel appears in the callstack, but the list of loaded drivers included ArcCtrl.sys, which caught my eye because I’d uninstalled TotalMediaTheatre a few days ago to see if that was contributing to the problems (ArcSoft stopped developing TMT years ago, and the version I have causes a BSOD on Windows 10, so it seemed like an obvious place to start). It turns out that ArcCtrl.sys is a well-known troublemaker which isn’t compatible with some updates and can also be left behind after uninstalling TMT. Manually deleting it allowed the failing updates to install OK.