Windows 11 Installation Media Bug Causes Security Update Failures (bleepingcomputer.com) 68
Microsoft is warning that Windows 11 installations using USB or CD media created with October or November 2024 security updates may be unable to receive future security patches.
The bug affects version 24H2 installations made between October 8 and November 12, but does not impact systems updated through Windows Update or the Microsoft Update Catalog. Microsoft advised users to rebuild installation media using December 2024 patches while it works on a permanent fix for the issue, which primarily affects business and education environments.
The bug affects version 24H2 installations made between October 8 and November 12, but does not impact systems updated through Windows Update or the Microsoft Update Catalog. Microsoft advised users to rebuild installation media using December 2024 patches while it works on a permanent fix for the issue, which primarily affects business and education environments.
Re: Jokes on them I only use floppy's. (Score:2)
I still have a working 1.44MB floppy disk driver you insensitive clod. It's USB though, as none ot my PC motherboards feature an FDD controller anymore.
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What makes you think this wasn't the specific intent: To force you to be online all the time, or else.
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I am undecided. Clearly, the sheer lack of skill Microsoft displays these days is staggering. But is it really outside of what can be explained by abject stupidity? Maybe it is, maybe not. Obviously, the other explanation is outright maliciousness, as you are suggesting.
Intent? (Score:2)
As much effort as the organization has historically put into acting badly, no, they don't get any benefit of the doubt. Sure, sometimes a fuckup is genuine incontinence, but consider how often their "errors" have been in their own favor.
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Well, yes. The thing is I doubt MS is competent enough to act maliciously in an effective fashion. My opinion of their skills is now so bad that I have trouble seeing them getting this done in their own favor without collapsing the whole house-of-cards they have built. On the "ethics" side, sure. MS will do any evil self-serving crap they think they can get away with, no argument.
What in the hell, Microsoft? (Score:5, Interesting)
Am I the only one who thinks Windows 11 just sounds worse and worse all the time? If it's not a slipshod rookie error like this, they're pushing updates that fundamentally change the UI of the OS (for instance, the taskbar), so the computer you boot up tomorrow won't even work like the one you were using yesterday. What madness is this? I can't imagine any large company tolerating this level of risk.
Re:What in the hell, Microsoft? (Score:5, Insightful)
Same here. Win11 seems to not only be effectively Win10, but it seems Win10 made significantly worse.
Re:What in the hell, Microsoft? (Score:5, Insightful)
Another day, another failure from Microsoft.
They know that almost everyone considers it a "given" that they need Windows. They know that the FUD around switching over to Linux or even Mac will ensure that most people continue to tolerate their incompetence and abuse. They know this, and they are right.
I have fully de-Microsofted my personal life, but I have to use Windows for work, as do so many others. This world is neither fair nor good, but it's what we've got.
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> What madness is this? I can't imagine any large company tolerating this level of risk.
Safe and effective, friend.
Not everybody got a bad batch but most did.
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they're pushing updates that fundamentally change the UI of the OS (for instance, the taskbar),
There have been zero fundamental changes to the OS UI, even task bar beyond setting the default but optional centre justification. Anyone who has used Windows Vista will instinctively know how Windows 11's taskbar, search, and desktop works. Anyone who has used Windows 95 knows how the windows are fundamentally interacted with.
It's window dressing changes mostly. People complain a lot about very insignificant changes.
I can't imagine any large company tolerating this level of risk.
And yet all of them do, so does that help you point to the fact your fundamental thesis may
Re: What in the hell, Microsoft? (Score:1)
Re: What in the hell, Microsoft? (Score:3)
The task bar has been enshitified. I used to have one wide/high enough to show dozens of apps or tabs. Not possible anymore under Win11. It looks prettier, sure, but is substantially less functional.
Just the opposite of what I want.
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window dressing _is_ the fundamental OS UI
you're yapping about the gas pedal still working the same but fucking with their arrangement/placement/etc is the same conversation as fucking with the injector
the most fundamental change of all was User Comes Second and the roots of that cancer are further upstream than the code
Re:What in the hell, Microsoft? (Score:4)
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Maintenance and new features are closely limited in their expenses. That results in short sighted situations like this.
Long story short, Microsoft does not value their operating system as an operating system. They value it as a method of control/revenue generation.
MS Would Be Di$$ish Not to Fix (Score:3)
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Indeed. But most MS users are "lusers" not users. Many are even effectively becoming an MS product.
Funny thing: I recently tried doing a backup of my teaching laptop with Windows (Win 10 because too many beamers with bad firmware crash with Linux and Teams on Linux is problematic, although I may try again 2025) and that completely failed. After messing about for several hours, I went back to simply blanking free space using cygwin and then booting Kali and doing a cat /dev/sdc |pbzip2 > img.bz2. That wor
Re: MS Would Be Di$$ish Not to Fix (Score:2)
I have been using Acronis true image for more than a decade . It works fairly well. I backup images onto my Linux NAS.
Windows sure has a lot of bugs, but it also has 20+ times as many desktop users as Linux does. Microsoft communities are full of workarounds for said bugs. And usually someone will answer if it's a previously unreported problem.
That's unfortunately way more than I can say about Linux communities . I have many critical bugs reported in various forums as serious as kernel hangs that nobody has
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That's interesting. I haven't had any direct experiences posting questions to MS official forums. But I have had a lot of frustration searching those forums for help with bells windows issues. A lot of the blind leading the blind there from what I can see.
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Not my experience at all. Usually there is a reply within a few hours from some MCSE. Not always immediately the right answer, but eventually one gets there, or determines if there isn't one.
Recently I had problems installing the Win11 24H2 update mentioned in this thread. One MCSE gave me a long list of steps, and I finally succeeded. One of those steps was ... to use the USB media rather than update through Windows update :(
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A lot of the blind leading the blind there from what I can see.
That was my impression as well when I tried to find out how to do a Windows-native backup. People are swapping the most obscure tricks, but hardly anybody really has a clue.
Re: MS Would Be Di$$ish Not to Fix (Score:2)
If you are trying to backup with MS tools, yes, you are in for a world of hurt. There are 3rd party tools that do a good job. Acronis is one. Incidentally, it lets me image my Ubuntu installation as well, though it can only do disk and partition level restores, not file level. That was plenty good enough to rollback from Ubuntu 24 to 22, though.
It can't handle ZFS root properly, though. Ext4 is fine.
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Sorry, Acronis is too much of an amateur-tool for me. I tried it and it was wayyyy to obscure what it does. Since I do understand low-level disk structure, I much rather do things myself where I know what I backed up and can verify anything I want reliably.
Re: MS Would Be Di$$ish Not to Fix (Score:2)
Your cat backup command is fine for what it does, but there are a variety of situations where it's not optimal when restoring - trying to restore to a different sized disk because of hardware failure, restoring only some partitions, only some file systems, only specific files. Acronis handles all these well, at least with Windows. It does have some rough edges especially with the rescue boot media creation. But you'll need to type more commands to replicate its functionality and/or spend more time waiting f
Re: MS Would Be Di$$ish Not to Fix (Score:2)
You just mount the image via a loop back device and restore whatever you want, be it a partition or a file.
PS, real men use dd, not cat. It's more complicated, so that is obviously the preferred method.
Re: MS Would Be Di$$ish Not to Fix (Score:2)
Large compressed images would be hard to mount directly without decompression.
But placing them on a compressed file system like ZFS resolves the issue. This is what I do with my Acronis backups.
dd is fine if you are restoring to identical size disk, but not as useful if you are restoring to different size, especially smaller disk.
I built 2 windows machines that use striping - 8 sata SSDs on my main desktop and 5 NVMe on a media and automation server. You can backup the stripe members with dd, but you end up
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PS, real men use dd, not cat. It's more complicated, so that is obviously the preferred method.
Hahahaha, always a good one. Now, older folks may know that the GNU textutils (of which cat is a part, I think) were not always 8-bit clean and dd was a thing. These days it is mainly complicated. Unless you figure out how to get a progress indicator out of them (which is complicated).
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All nicely covered. Seriously. First, I do _partition_ level imaging + the first 10MB or so of the disk to get the partition table (yes, could be done smaller, but this way I get all possible headers and 10MB is nothing). Allows partition or full-disk restore nicely. Second, gparted is a thing. Third, single file recovery? From a system backup? Why would I want that? If I really do: Loop-mount the partition image, read the file, done.
All simple. All clear what it does. No dependency on some GUI that does hi
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By different sized disk I meant possibly smaller, which would require manual edits to your partition. Which you can do on the command-line, it's just more work. Same for resizing the file system when restoring the data.
I still think you will have a hard time with cat/dd with stripes when the drives are different sizes or even different number of drives. gparted does not handle Windows dynamic disks / NTFS stripes, as far as I know.
I backup everything in one go - OS boot drive and data drive (stripe), withou
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Reinstalling an operating system--and all of its programs and data is not something users should ever tolerate.
As said this mostly affects enterprise, and reinstalling the OS and all of its programs is something enterprises hire IT departments to manage in a streamlined way. Virtually no consumer end users are manually using installation media. Computers shipped with Windows system recovery images by default (basically all which aren't self built) are unaffected.
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Reinstalling an operating system--and all of its programs and data is not something users should ever tolerate.
If you can't even tolerate the traditional "Windows Fix", then get the hell out of computing and go to iOS land where you'll be handled properly. PCs aren't for the masses anymore, and haven't been since smartphones became good enough for them to mindlessly consume with.
Oh, and before you fire back an angry message about my tone: Being kind to intentionally lazy, weekend-killing, end users is not something Administrators should ever tolerate.
24H2 again! (Score:2)
This has to be the worst update Microsoft has ever put out. Without exaggeration it seems as if every other week there is another serious issue. At this point pull the thing, undo any changes, and don't release it until they've done some kind of testing. It's clear they're making end users be testers in production.
Re:24H2 again! (Score:4, Insightful)
The old story is that Microsoft replaced test dept with Telemetry(tm) [ghacks.net].
Some softies recently noted that the buffers of quality that were there started now depleting, so the Win10/Win11 are riddled with system-wide bugs.
And then there is also change of mentality: Windows OS was a product before - but since Win10(?) it's officially a service, and not something customers own. Needless to remind, QA of a deliverable product and QA for providing a service are two distinct (often unrelated) categories.
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It's not must Microsoft too. Look at Apple, Google, etc. QA is lacking. I used to be a SQA tester. Others and I got let go. :(
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The funny thing is that they are not even doing any major changes. It seems these days Microsoft is incapable of doing even tiny things right.
Best Update Evar! (Score:3)
Re: Best Update Evar! (Score:2)
WinAero tweaker can disable Windows update for free.
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o365 gets slowly worse as well, as basically all their products do. Lack of competition with do that. I do not think they "forgot" to check patch quality. I think they do not care. As long as most people cannot reasonably move away from their crap, that will get worse.
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I worked with a client recently who was using MS online products like Teams and Office. It was my first time working with that software for a little while.
The online version of Excel literally couldn't even show a simple spreadsheet without obvious drawing bugs that totally broke the basic grid layout or even completely hid changes that had just been made to cell contents when rendering the sheet. The online versions of Office applications often seem to be dumbed down and missing functionality that was avai
Crapware is crapware (Score:2)
I really wish a good mainstream competitor would emerge that actually does care about engineering that is not just barely "good enough". Or often somewhat below that level as Microsoft seems to be aiming for.
apple hardware lockin and pushing for app store (Score:1)
apple hardware locking in (storage markup is like 3-4X pc costs) and pushing for app store lock in is just as bad.
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Steam OS?
It has a Windows compatibility layer via Proton/Wine to install Windows Games via their store.
If they added the ability to package/install generic Windows applications in their own sandbox...
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Maybe. Valve has managed to keep it alive and slowly improving for quite some time now. On the other hand, it may also need an Office competitor that is pretty compatible file-wise. MS Office will never be interoperable in that way unless they get forced to stop their sabotaging it. For things you do not need to exchange with MS Office, LibreOffice is already vastly superior and wastes far less of your time.
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There are at least 2. Linux and FreeBSD. Their problem is they place their resources on engineering and not marketing.
My oldest system running the latest software on new hardware was installed back in 2003. Ever since then it's been updates and upgrades and cleaning.
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That is why I wrote "mainstream". Neither Linux nor FreeBDS are.
Re: Crapware is crapware (Score:2)
The humanity on the user side too leads to irrational dependency. Fear of change is extremely motivating
I don't blame
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Oh, it will happen. At some point the MS crap will have gotten so bad that enough organizations will simply be completely fed up with it and will move away. But whether that happens in 5 years or in 50 is unclear. With the extreme security problems MS currently has and fails to get under control, it may not take long though.
Well screw me then (Score:2)
I oversaw a significant deployment during that period.
Now I get to chat with the management and security teams to see if we tell the clients we have to rebuild their office or if we wait it out. We'll wait it out, I'm sure, but it's still going to be an annoyance.
Working hard... (Score:2)
Working hard on security or hardly working security, despite the new "security initiative..." typical Microsoft spin-control which is cheaper than actual security.
https://blogs.windows.com/wind... [windows.com]
Microsoft should fire some of these dunderhead executives, managers that are leading by example. Now to wait the press release that Microsoft values customer's security and place the highest trust in making the Windows 11 experience a secure one, and blah-blah-blah.
Yet Microsoft has lowered the bar so low that only
Windows was always inexplicably bad at updates (Score:4, Insightful)
Even ye olde simple tarballs on Slackware always worked better than Microsoft's update schemes, and Windows users have always had to reboot a lot more for updates than anyone else. Coming from a Unix background from machines from the eighties where updates were typically flawless and didn't require a reboot unless it was necessary because libc or the kernel had to be updated, I always scoffed at Windows' inability to do the slightest update either reliably or without a reboot, and sometimes with both a reboot and a failure.
Every version of Windows which has had "Windows Update" has had bugs where even a system with practically no software on it will break itself so badly that Windows Update no longer updates windows, typically giving an inscrutable and overused error code which means little to nothing even once looked up on their openly absurdist and non-performant website.
The only versions of Windows I "never" used (except briefly and in passing) were 1 and 2, so perhaps there was a time when updates to Windows worked correctly and I'm just not aware of it. I suppose most of the patches I've installed for Windows 3.x worked ok, so maybe "always" is hyperbole, but literally every version of Windows since 95 and NT4 has had problems with updating.
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I feel like Win2k (and XP) service packs were reasonably decent. I also don't remember having too much issue with even general updates with those, at least from a user perspective. I suppose towards the end XP got a little bit creaky from all the stuff bolted onto it while Vista/7 were delayed but I have mostly positive memories of it. I didn't do a whole lot with the server versions of those so can't really speak to the Server experience.
Win3.x and before mostly scraped by through the benefit of just not r
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I feel like Win2k (and XP) service packs were reasonably decent.
Win2k SP2 caused a bunch of machines to become unreliable...
And for PXE boot installs ? (Score:1)
Last november, our mother company forced upgrade of all our computers from windows 10 to window 11 through PXE boot reinstall. Is this installation method corrupted too ?