Windoze Update Grief

[banjo]

Last night, yet again, the Windoze "update" collapsed on me, just sitting there at "Installing 0%". I left it churning and went up the wooden hill at near 1-00 AM. This morning I was confronted with the ubiquitous error message. I wish they would just display a "Good luck with that sucker."

I've been putting up with this for several years now. Recently, perhaps the last six months or so, I've had a recurring problem with insufficient disk space for the recovery partition preventing the H22 update from being embodied. They can't tell you what's wrong straight off the bat- nope, you have to search for the meaning of a cryptic alpha-numeric string error code (as usual). I immediately ended up at a M$ web page dated January 15 explaining that they were aware of this issue and were working on the problem and offered a manual fix. Gawd 'elp us, I decided that I'd go for it and resize the OS partition and donate the resultant spare disk space to the winRE partition. Now, yer silly Hippy was an FDISK warrior and this EUFI / GPT / what have you stuff is all a bit brain mashing, but at least FDISK experience does alert you what not to do. I promptly backed up Documents and Downloads to the attached 2TB drive.

It would appear that FDISK has attained State Pension Age,and DISKPART is my new friend. All went swimmingly until it came to recreating the recovery partition. I kept getting "incorrect format" for the create partition command argument. I had confirmed the asterix flag for GPT which indicated the required recovery partition argument for the create partition command, but the b4st4rd obstinately refused to play ball.

We went out for a walk with Cloud to Windsor Great Park and not wanting to turn the beast off in case it fell over on reboot, I left it humming away with the display turned off. Upon return and after another couple of hours wasted going round in circles, I decided to ignore the GPT status and tag it for the old MBR designator for the recovery partition, as in NOT GUID /GPT.  What could possibly go wrong? Well, amazigly that worked. Then I used the reagentc /enable command (another new one on me) even though I thought being previously unknown to me it was for GPT yet I was unexpectedly back in the saddle. I assigned a drive letter Z to the recreated partition to avoid a start up shuffle and that's where I'm at, hesitant about turning it off. I don't think the drive letter assignment was necessary really, and perhaps I should work out how to hide it from explorer. I returned to Windows Update in Settings, clicked retry and Ta-Da! Job done.

I was that close to jumping ship to Dave's beloved Mint.

[banjo]

Actually, FDISK is really old, I was using Partition Magic for years. That was great software. I acquired a legit copy with HyperOS. (ah- HyperOS- brilliant software. Memories!)

[nob]

Well done, its a while since i used a programme to manage my HDD but IIR it was disk management software I obtained from a ship.

[banjo]

You know, I always considered partition manipulation to be a risky enough business from a command prompt outside of Windows' "comfort zone"- a bit like flashing a BIOS on a running PC. It seemed to me like jumping up from the floor and changing your boots before hitting the ground again. Even Partition Magic offered a Windows environment system as well as a disk boot system, but I always went for the latter.

Although Diskpart seems alien at first, you soon realise that it's the same old same old, albeit using different terminology and probably capable of usurping FDISK's upper TB limit. I'm not in any hurry to repeat the exercise though. Despite the anomaly of using an MBR command on a GPT flagged disk (which I cannot explain), there remains the garbage instructions on Redmond's website which they publish for all comers in addition to those that have been down that path already, but the telling indifferent shoulder shrugs reveal all you need to know to those who think that being calm, reserved and adult about the whole process will endear them in some small way to M$. Pull the other one.

When we "owned" the software that we'd "paid for ...", that still had some foundation, but with W$ now being designated as a "service" (which if you think about it could but for the global outcry be remotely disabled) there is no longer any justification in that. I read sometime within the last year that Windows running on s Linux kernel is being investigated. What a hoot!

I haven't plucked up the courage to boot it up again yet ...

[banjo]

And one other thing; M$ was stating that 250 Gb is the required minimum winRE partition size for the Windows Update to go through. B.S. Mine was already about 470 Mb courtesy of Lenovo. Shows why M$ are "working on it".

As it stands, having had to delete the winRE partition to resize it (Partition Magic never needed to do that) I suppose I no longer have any recovery anyway? It's all crap.

[nob]

Bills too busy trying to save the world now Steve.

[banjo]

I noticed that with Diskpart you can (if you wish) specify "offset" as well as partition size(s). This strikes me as an improvement over the old system of specifying cylinders. That always had me scratching my head because of the 1000 / 1024 discrepancy. Something positive from a new wheel design?