Report: Microsoft's latest Windows 11 24H2 update breaks SSDs/HDDs, may corrupt your data

So it's working as planned?

I use arch btw

The crowd exhales we know
Thanks for letting me know! You're not going to believe this, but I, too, use Arch.

WHY ARE YOU NOT UPDATING TO WIN ELEVEN? Hard to recommend this OS without QA.

Agile has been a mistake for the software industry. It did nothing except to give executive more avenue to force changes to the software that are being developed and in the end it'll take a longer time to have production ready software when compared to traditional waterfall approach.
- It depends on the use case. For incremental changes and validation of hypotheses in an uncertain or new product Agile is great. It allows for fast valuation and fast pivoting. I would not recommend Agile for systems that are mostly known and need a big upgrade, that's not what its for.
  Agile became a buzzword and shouldn't have been implemented as widespread as it has. It does have its use cases though.
Your OS isn't getting regular updates!!!
This is a feature imo.

The 24H2 update would not install on a brand new prebuilt PC that I bought for my parents. I contacted both the manufacturer and Microsoft and spent too many hours troubleshooting before I gave up and returned it to where I bought it as defective. Back to the drawing board for a replacement PC for my parents.

So you're saying I'll be safe from this if I stick with win 10 past October?

That update made me buy my first Framework laptop! Fuck Microsoft!!

I love my 13". Does exactly what I need. I kind of want the 12", but I don't really need it. So i'm going to hold off.

Butbutbutbut Linux is not ready for desktop! I asked a stupid question in an Arch forum and they told me to RTFM! It does not support kernel level anti-cheat! Terminals are scary!

Etc, etc.

good I'm convinced. just one thing... which graphic design programs does it run natively?
- figma
It does not support kernel level anti-cheat!
Huh, thought you were mentioning only the cons.
- Gods luck playing any of the biggest, most played games in the world without it.
You jest but would you really install Arch on your grandmother’s PC?
- Why not ? I suppose that as long as a browser (and whatever else she need) is working, my grandmother would not need much more. And I could also install a windows11 theme on KDE, if I really want to. A icon is a icon
  And in the end I think that my grandmother would be able to mantain neither a window machine, so I don't see the problem.
- When my wife's grandparents had to get a new computer they got upset about the new windows interface and the fact their old games didn't work, so I set them up with Linux and a DE that resembled XP (it's what they were familiar with), and I was able to get most of their games going.
  They used it without issue until they died.
- Depends on her needs. If she uses it for Facebook, no problem, since I'll be admining her system anyways

of file corruption when symptoms occurs" adds the report (Translated from Japanese by Grok AI).

Why would you use an LLM to translate text? There are tools made specifically for that

Which are based on LLMs or other neural network models. It is kind of the thing that language models are actually good at.
See DeepL for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepL_Translator
The service uses a proprietary algorithm with convolutional neural networks (CNNs)[3] that have been trained with the Linguee database.[4][5]
According to the developers, the service uses a newer improved architecture of neural networks, which results in a more natural sound of translations than by competing services.
The translation is said to be generated using a supercomputer that reaches 5.1 petaflops and is operated in Iceland with hydropower.[6][7]
In general, CNNs are slightly more suitable for long coherent word sequences, but they have so far not been used by the competition because of their weaknesses compared to recurrent neural networks.
The weaknesses of DeepL are compensated for by supplemental techniques, some of which are publicly known.
- Yeah I know they're based on LLMs, but they're more adapted to translation, right?
- As someone who's played a few LLM translated games, it is in fact not good at it. There's a lot of contextual hints that get lost and slang terms tend to confuse it. It does make it close enough where a human that doesn't speak/read the original language could easily finish the translation though or still make it through the game.
Honestly, translations are one of the few things LLMs are good for. It can catch things like idioms or other things a machine translator may mistranslate. Though tbf, the main appeal is still live translation.
- I want my Babbelfish.

I switched to Mac after my old Asus laptop went out. I figure why bother with a PC laptop, it’s not gonna game and let’s see what the fuss is about. Love my MacBook Air. So then our desktop dies and I give my wife 3 options. A Mac, a cheaper PC, and a more expensive PC. She’s Android, figured she’d want to stick with Windows, but she picked the Mac! So happy. I mostly game on Switch and Xbox these days so that’s fine.

I keep feeling like I left Windows at the right time.

Being happy for someone switching to mac and being on lemmy where everyone is on the Linux train, was not on my bingo card.
- Unix unity. Linux 💜 Mac 💜 BSD
- Thanks I guess? Surely Mac and Linux users can be friends or at least allies against Windows. Linux comes from UNIX which macOS is based on so they’re very similar, only one is FOSS — which I suppose is the point — and the other is not. But another commonality — Macs and PCs can both run Linux.
I feel you may be boarding a different sinking ship: https://youtu.be/JUG1PlqAUJk
I have been using Linux Mint for over half a year now, and besides gaming, I had no issues with a great experience. Had very bad experience with other Linux distros.
- How does Apple's profitability being a little less than it used to be (they're still insanely profitable) imply that it's a "sinking ship"?
  I'm a Linux user as well, but use macOS at work and it's fine.

How's that vibe coding working out for ya?

Didn't they proudly say how much of windows is AI generated slop code a few months ago?
It looks like finally after almost ten years they will complete the dark mode on windows. But some buttons will still be with the light theme, they ran out of ai credits and need to wait for next month to replenish the free tier
I think it has more to do with the new atomic update and their now-usual not-testing aproach.

Linux users: "See what we mean?"

Windows users: "La la la! I can't hear you! Losing my data is clearly better than having to learn something new!"

Linux users: "See what we mean?"
Windows users: "La la la! I can't hear you! Losing my data is a standard Windows feature!"
- Your account seems to be marked as a bot, you can fix that in your user settings if it was unintentional
I have literally never had one of these things happen to me before. I'm pretty sure people just make them up for clicks at this point.
- I know people who were affected when a Windows 10 update just straight up deleted all personal files in 2020.
  https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2020/02/19/new-windows-10-update-starts-causing-serious-problems/
- Oh?
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Windows_11
- This was an issue that appeared when writing heavy files to disks (50gb+), so people that werent doing it were safe. And don't worry, its a matter of when LOL. I was a windows "virgin" until one day my system drive appeared encrypted and locked by bitlocker when I never activated it, nor had any recovery key.
So you mean losing your data on Linux not easy as rm -rd?
- "You mean if I delete data, then it's gone? No matter what platform?"
- Updating windows is not a command that deletes your data
- There is a difference between telling your computer to delete something and the computer complying, and doing a windows update only to find it's corrupted your data or straight up killed your disk.
  I'm not going to get angry when I tell my PC to delete a file and it actually does it.
- rm -rf is way more difficult than doing literally nothing, yes.
- Linux treats users like a person and Windows treats users like children. Be the person Linux trusts you to be.
- $ su - # rm -rf —no-preserve-root /
  Should do the trick. (Obviously don’t try it unless you know what you are doing and know what may happen when it hits your EFI variables.)
- I love how people immediately downvoted you to hell for this lmfao.
  Like yeah, the guys on the comments: only people use rm -rf, absolutely no scripts use it at all. Something like motherfucking STEAM absolutely didn't remove people's data that one time. And hey, their so beloved --no-preserve-root didn't prevent that from happening. :D
  I love and currently use Linux, but my GOD some Linux people are annoying.
  If something like del C:\*.* somehow ended up deleting your D: drive too, we wouldn't stop hearing the end of it, but here on Linux systems, it is a perfectly normal thing, and people somehow DEFEND this atrocity lmfao.
  rm shouldn't exist at its current form. Full stop.
- Not with GNU rm, no.

The reporter’s own “test” proves this is caused by faulty drives unable to sustain the speed they advertise, not Windows.

Why would IO speed be a factor in whether a user's data is corrupted? That just sounds like a race condition.
Are you suggesting the drives are accessed more slowly before this update?
- Maybe ? I know R/W speeds used to be a lot slower in Windows than Linux but I thought they fixed that a few years ago.

Yesterday I got into the process of installing Windows 10 onto my laptop because I am selling it tomorrow. I asked the buyer if he wanted it with an OS or not, and he replied that he wanted Windows 10 Pro. I downloaded the ISO and installed it to one of my M.2 SATA SSD drives with a USB adapter.

Before installing Windows over my Linux installation, I did a SecureErase to wipe out my drive with the Linux installation because that is the SSD I am selling with the computer.

After installing Windows 10 from the M.2 SATA SSD with a USB adapter to the SecureErased drive, I instantly got multiple error messages about SMART checks saying that the SSD was broken/corrupted. I had never seen this POST error message when booting that computer with a Linux installation.

Well, I obviously had to change the drive to another one where I got the Windows installation to work normally without the BIOS POST error message.

I really cannot be sure what caused that. Can SecureErase do that so SMART checks report the drive as corrupted? Or was it the Windows installation?

SecureErase would overwrite the whole drive (potentially multiple times). So if the ssd was close to dead, it might have just triggered it.
- I see. Well the SSD was used and few years old. Some Samsung SSD from a OEM build. I did run SMART tests on it like year ago and it was ok/healthy.
  Time to fill it with linux isos and seed them with torrentz until it breaks completely.
Windows bad because I made a user error >:(
Hm...Weird way to shift blame.
- where is the user error? is this user error with us in the room?
Uh v lå p.

“We looked around and could not find other reports resembling such situations. The problem has been reported by a Japanese PC builder and enthusiast and some of the comments on the thread seem to indicate that others there may be experiencing similar issues. So it could be a region-specific thing too”

Actual footage of Windows 11 24H2 corrupting your data

what movie is this from? I feel like I've seen it before many, many years ago.
- The original Ghostbusters.
If I was a librarian and my card catalog started exploding, I would have a fit. Those are not easy to put together.
- Yeah but luckily by the mid 80s it was completely digitized and just there in the basement for reference.
That's not my data.

Yet again, I trot out this phrase, as a response to yet another massive Windows fuckup/scandal:

... People are still using Windows?

many have to - work from home, have to share data and programs with other workers. There are of course ways around it but I know literally thousands of people who are supplied with a company laptop with windows on it and they have to use it...
- Huh, sounds to me like bad security and data integrity policies/practices from whatever company, probably not very well run places to work for.
Yet again - headline and article are massive overexaggerations, talking about an issue that a few people have had in very specific situations and saying it breaks everyones SSDs/HDDs and might corrupt their data to get people like you to get outraged and spread FUD.
Remember - if even 0.01% of people on Windows 11 get an error with an update, that is like 100k people. A 0.01% error rate is nothing. It's not even worth mentioning. It's not even worth investigating. Sure it sucks for those 100k people, and they'll be complaining to everyone that will listen - but it's not a big issue. That's this. That's this exact thing.
- Wow, with a mentality like that, you're a perfect fit for medical school.
Came here to say "Well, maybe they're corrupting your data."
Look at it from the flip side: Linux is so bad people would rather deal with this than deal with Linux.
- Meh - people are creatures of habit. To quote a family member "I'm too old to learn a new operating system!" Any change, even over to Mac OS, is rejected by most Windows users. Even when 99.9% of what they do is in a web browser.
I use "incontrol" to stop feature updates. And I used win11debloat. Havent had a problem since. In dogshit bloat, no dog shit copilot, no forced updates, no privacy destroying telemetry. Just me and MY windows machine like the old days.
- And I’m sure you’ll blame Microsoft/windows when things don’t work as expected and you get strange errors because you disabled core features using dodgy software that you don’t understand but think you don’t need them.
- Well yes, but actually this is a security update

They're using Grok to translate?

They probably used copilot to write the code. It compiled so they shipped it.
- Take that deniers!

Is this an automatic update that I can stop ?

The company managed to resolve the issue later and has deployed a fix.

"You have destroyed the very thing you swore to become" also works.
- I suppose, but reading the article, it seems this was related to a windows defender update. In other words the anti-virus became malware, again.

Bah, each time I want to do the manual upgrade from 23h2 I have to postpone it again due to some stupid bug or annoying feature that makes me reconsider doing it.

Again? I swear I saw this a month or two ago.

Thank god i blocked windows updates and only allowed security updates for 23H2...

Can't they just offer access to your data back at a discounted rate compared to what they charge their data partners for it?

It got me!. I turn crypto services off and it keeps turning back on. What a pain in the ass!