flipped power off during an update

Paul wrote:

snip

The OS will already have run CHKDSK, so if
"CHKDSK was a bad idea", it might already be too late.
He might have been flipping the power while it was
running CHKDSK.

Is it possible for you to help me understand what you wrote? Under what
scenarios is it a "bad idea" to run CHKDSK? What happens when you cycle
power as CHKDSK is running?

Thank you, 73,

--
Don Kuenz KB7RPU
There was a young lady named Bright Whose speed was far faster than light;
She set out one day In a relative way And returned on the previous night.

On Tue, 8 Oct 2019 15:57:56 -0000 (UTC), Don Kuenz wrote:
Ralph Fox wrote:

Persuade your customer to move to a fast NVME SSD, to avoid similar
incidents in the future.

That's good to know. May your silver bullet serve you for a very long
time.

I doubt it will serve for decades to come. I built a grunty PC in
the late 1990's. Ten years later it would not have been able to
install and run the then-current version of Windows.


Let me close with an ancient aphorism:

"Software expands to fill available hardware."


That is right. That is how we got to where we are today, when you
need a fast SSD to install major Windows updates in a reasonable time.
And the same principle will eventually force us to move again, to new
hardware not yet available today.

A fast NVME SSD is a fix for the customer's anger _today_. Five years
from now, a different fix may be required.


--
Kind regards
Ralph

Don Kuenz wrote:
Paul wrote:

snip

The OS will already have run CHKDSK, so if
"CHKDSK was a bad idea", it might already be too late.
He might have been flipping the power while it was
running CHKDSK.

Is it possible for you to help me understand what you wrote? Under what
scenarios is it a "bad idea" to run CHKDSK? What happens when you cycle
power as CHKDSK is running?

Thank you, 73,

chkdsk could be repairing. If it gets interrupted from a crash, outage,
or anything unexpected, then data corruptions.

--
Why is this ant sick again, but with a nasty allergy (leaks, sneezes, and itches)? No cold, flu like from the end of August, and massive poops from this stupid old body.
Note: A fixed width font (Courier, Monospace, etc.) is required to see this signature correctly.
/\___/\ Ant(Dude) @ http://aqfl.net & http://antfarm.home.dhs.org /
/ /\ /\ \ http://antfarm.ma.cx. Please nuke ANT if replying by e-mail.
| |o o| |
\ _ /
( )

On 10/7/19 2:18 PM, me wrote:
In reply to "T" who wrote the following:

On 10/7/19 1:20 PM, me wrote:
In reply to "T" who wrote the following:

Hi All,

Got an emergency call. Customer got angry at
an update and flipped the power off. Details
of what transpired are really sketchy other than
he has flipped the power off several times and
his business is down. And he is really angry.
I have to go out to his site in a few mintues.

Yikes

I printed out to take with me:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...covery-options

I take it that I can't a safe mode and "sfc /scannow" with
10?

After I get him going, I am going to ShutUp10 EVERYTHING
and no more updates EVER.

Any word of wisdom?

Are you planning to charge money for this visit? I'm kinda thinking you
probably
shouldn't. It doesn't seem right.




I had nothing to do with his decision to flip the
power off. He never ever asked me for advice before
doing so. How in the world do you think this is
a warranty action on my part?


I was commenting on the technician, not the customer.

Oh I get it. You were trolling trying to pick a fight.

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

Thank you for helping me update my kill file.

Don Kuenz wrote:
Paul wrote:

snip

The OS will already have run CHKDSK, so if
"CHKDSK was a bad idea", it might already be too late.
He might have been flipping the power while it was
running CHKDSK.

Is it possible for you to help me understand what you wrote? Under what
scenarios is it a "bad idea" to run CHKDSK? What happens when you cycle
power as CHKDSK is running?

Thank you, 73,


Let me give you an example.

I've already had one case here, of a failure involving
an IDE ribbon cable disk drive setup. I'd been working
inside a PC and "bumped" the ribbon cable, and (apparently)
pulled it partly out of its mate. The whole bus wasn't
touching. The connector was on an angle.

If a person, upon seeing some strange symptoms or
corruption, attempts to run CHKDSK, it will "do 100,000 writes"
to that disk, attempting to repair it (because every
read will be bad). And the bad writes will completely
destroy the information content. Nothing will be
left when it's finished. I've seen a report of this
in a newsgroup.

CHKDSK is a "repair-in-place" solution. Any time you
use it, be aware it can "rewrite the disk" on you. If
there is a structural problem (even a problem with
"bad memory" where the disk sectors are buffered,
which has happened to me), sending CHKDSK on a mission
at that point can be deadly.

Utilities which move your data to a second drive while
fixing it, those are better as they do not threaten the
source drive.

Power cycling CHKDSK does not guarantee a grisly ending,
but if enough "damage" to an NTFS partition accumulates,
you can break it. This is why the modern versions of
Windows have some kind of background scanning and integrity
checking they do, which reduces the need to run CHKDSK
on a regular basis to solve the "accumulated damage" problem.

On an OS like Win2K, you might want to run CHKDSK every
three months, to flush out any structural damage that
has accumulated over that interval. On Windows 10, you
don't need to do that, as Windows 10 is working on that
for you. And, I have not seen any web pages describing
if the background scan finds a problem, what it's supposed
to do - as some procedures could need approval from the user.
I've seen no reports in a newsgroup, traceable to background
scans.

If you damage the shadow copy subsystem, it can prevent
recovery of the partition. I lost a copy of Windows 7 that
way. The shadow copy subsystem is the "most leverage"
you can use against a partition (short of deleting the $MFT
directly). The files for shadow copies, are inside
System Volume Information. And yes, you can get at them.

*******

Summary: Before using CHKDSK, consider the hardware situation
first. Is there any reason to suspect a hardware
subsystem is damaged ? If so, then DON'T run CHKDSK.
Think carefully, about making a backup first using a
sector-by-sector method. Work on the copy and see if
a disaster befalls the copy. If so, then you definitely
know there's a hardware issue you have to solve first,
before you can fix the source disk.

The first sign of failed memory on my machine, was
running Verify on a Macrium backup and having it claim
a failure (bad checksum). Only a certain date range
of backups were ruined. And as part of testing, I
detected (using the Windows memory tester of all things),
that my memory was defective in a lower memory area.
Once the memory was replaced, I could do disk I/O
error free again. If I wanted to run CHKDSK, it would
make sense to be running it *after* the new memory was
installed, not before.

Paul

On 08/10/2019 22:02, Jim H wrote:



but this
customer's problem seems to have little to do with hardware speed and
everything to do with impatience with a PC set up (improperly)

The PC was setup by a known rogue trader who hates everything created by
Microsoft but is quite willing to hood-wink the unsuspecting customers.
In some countries this is fraud; It is a matter of time before this
trader is arrested.




--
With over 1,000,000 million devices now running Windows 10, customer
satisfaction is higher than any previous version of windows.

On 10/7/19 12:58 PM, T wrote:
Hi All,

Got an emergency call.Â* Customer got angry at
an update and flipped the power off.Â* Details
of what transpired are really sketchy other than
he has flipped the power off several times and
his business is down.Â* And he is really angry.
I have to go out to his site in a few mintues.

Yikes

I printed out to take with me:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...covery-options

I take it that I can't a safe mode and "sfc /scannow" with
10?

After I get him going, I am going to ShutUp10 EVERYTHING
and no more updates EVER.

Any word of wisdom?

-T

Follow up:

Hi All,

I just got back into the office. I am looking
]at a ton of responses. I will pour over them
shortly. Wow, Thank you all!

Okay, when I go there it transpired that the customer
needed to do invoices for customers tapping their
feet in front of him, so he flipped the power off
SEVERAL times. What I found was that it go to the
log on screen showing the time. When I clicked
or touched anything the time would sweep off the
top and the computer would freeze.

Oh great. So I restarted the computer and
deliberately powered it off during boot. This
triggered the recovery screen. I undid the
upgrade and rolled it back. No joy.

I sent to boot of my 1809 stick to go into
repair and the SOB motherboard did not
support booting off a USB stick, including the
USB2 ports. One of those so and so's (Gateway
by Acer).

Oh great, I carry the ISO but they only had one
computer, so how to cut a DVD? And I'd be there
till one in the morning fixing everything. I
do carry a USB DVD drive for such problems, but
none of my dvd OS's have burners on them.

But, they did not only have one computer. The
customer pointed out the new computer (HP el-cheap-o)
he had bought a while back but could not figure out
how to transfer his over specialty software. He wanted
to rid himself of the current computer as it was
always having problems.

Okay, so I insalled his old hard drive over
as a second hard drive on the new computer, finished
W10 1803 home installation, called his software
vendor, who remoted in and was tickled to have
access to the old hard drive.

And happy camping returned.

Then I installed Open Shell, LibreOffice, ShutUp10,
Foxit Reader, Irfanview, Brave, ESET Endpoint trial,
and disabled Fast Boot.

And I 100% locked down his computer with the
customers expressed wish. Well, more like
a command. NO MORE UPDATES, EVER!! He
does not take credit cards over his computer (my
recommendation), so PCI (Payment Card Industry)
is placated

You know, Windows Nien, oops, Windows Ten is truly a
miserable piece of crap to run as a Point-of-Sale
computer. You can't have it taking all day to do
a surprise update when a customers are waiting.
It is understandable why he would have flipped the
power switch.

Thank you again for all the help!

-T

On 10/7/19 2:03 PM, Paul wrote:
T wrote:
On 10/7/19 1:23 PM, Don Kuenz wrote:
T wrote:
Hi All,

Got an emergency call.Â* Customer got angry at
an update and flipped the power off.Â* Details
of what transpired are really sketchy other than
he has flipped the power off several times and
his business is down.Â* And he is really angry.
I have to go out to his site in a few mintues.

Yikes

I printed out to take with me:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...covery-options


I take it that I can't a safe mode and "sfc /scannow" with
10?

After I get him going, I am going to ShutUp10 EVERYTHING
and no more updates EVER.

Any word of wisdom?

In such casesÂ* chkdsk c: /fÂ* is always my first move. Unless a recovery
drive is available, powering down during an update almost always
guarantees that the "reinstall from installation media" is the only
viable option open to you. Although the reinstall typically moves the
original C:\Windows to C:\Windows.old you will still need to re-install
applications.
Â*Â*Â*Â* At best you can disable windows update service for a week to ten
days. After that Microsoft reaches right on in an updates whether you
like it or not.

Thank you, 73,



Thank you!

Oh I can disable the update service permanently.
I am sneaky.

Is this "customer" equipped with your backup system ?

See my followup.

HAHAHAHA. No backup what so ever. Now he is backing up
his specialty software to the old hard drive I installed
in his new computer.

Where do these vendors get the idea that it is a good
practice to use one of your four tires as your spare?

UPS'es, Anti Virus, and backup are hard to sell until
the customer has put his hand in the fire. Before that,
I get treated like I am trying to scam them, so I
pick and choose my battles.


The OS will already have run CHKDSK,

I won't run squat.

It was running the annoy balls saying it was doing
an upgrade. Well, the first power off. Yes, I know
it occasionally says not to flip it off, but who
reads.

so if
"CHKDSK was a bad idea", it might already be too late.
He might have been flipping the power while it was
running CHKDSK.

He flipped it several times. The first time, he could actually
get into Windows, but it would eventually freeze up. So
lets flip the power off a few more times.


You could backup the system as it currently stands,
restore from previous backup, then import email folders and
business related stuff and bring the OS back to
its current revision level.

If the machine was in the middle of the September patch
that came in a few days ago, you might need to do this.
He must have had some reason to be hitting the power...
And remember that tomorrow is Patch Tuesday, which could
further complicate your situation unless you click the
"delay update for 7 days" button in Windows Update.

Â*Â* DISM /image:c:\ /cleanup-image /revertpendingactions

Could not get a command prompt, even from install media. BIOS
won't boot off a stick and I don't carry installer DVD's
with me. I do carry the 1903 ISO, but my Live DVD's (w10 and
Fedora) don't have DVD burner apps. And his USB ports were
acting really weird.

And I was primed for chkdsk, sfc, and dism. Had all their
printouts ready in my briefcase too! But they only
work in a command prompt.


In terms of patches, there's Patch Tuesday, but sometimes
there's a patch near the end of the month, and that might
be what I was seeing coming in on my "Win10 on HDD" setup.

Good luck with your emergency call...

Thank you! It did work out well in the end.

A customer like that would make me, um, nervous.

Ya, you know it is understandable what he did. He
had customers standing in front of him tapping
their feet wanting quotes and bills. Windows Nein
is just not a reasonable platform for running
this kind of software


Â*Â* Paul

Thank you for all the help!

-T

On 10/8/19 7:14 AM, Carlos E.R. wrote:
And then you will be legally liable for any malware incident that would
be prevented by an update.

Ya, I know. But he demanded it, so I think I am covered.
And my house is homesteaded, so no lawyer in this state
would take his case.

He could as well sue me for Windows Nein crashing his machine.

Plus I put on ESET End Point Advanced, which is a bazillion
times better at security than any of M$'s garbage.

He can not have an OS that does a surprise update when
customers are tapping their feet waiting for a quote
or an invoice.

Windows Nein is just a really, really bad choice to
run Point-of-Sale software on.

On 10/7/19 3:39 PM, VanguardLH wrote:
T wrote:

Got an emergency call. Customer got angry at
an update and flipped the power off. Details
of what transpired are really sketchy other than
he has flipped the power off several times and
his business is down. And he is really angry.
I have to go out to his site in a few mintues.

Yikes

I printed out to take with me:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...covery-options

I take it that I can't a safe mode and "sfc /scannow" with
10?

After I get him going, I am going to ShutUp10 EVERYTHING
and no more updates EVER.

I take it you did not previously configure a daily scheduled image
backup from which you (remotely) or they (manually) do a restore?

He has only been a customer for a month and I have only
seen his once.

Some
backup programs allow a GFS (Grandfather-Father-Son) setup where you do,
for example, monthly full backups, weekly differential backups, and
daily incremental backups. If this "business" doesn't have a scheduled
backup in place (NO, not one where the user must initiate a backup
because users forget or incorrectly deem a backup isn't needed yet they
have no way to know the future) then they no business doing business
without a proper backup setup. No backups indicates the business is
just a hobby, not a real business.

I use Macrium Reflect which somewhat does a GFS scheme. At 4AM on the
first Saturday of the month, a full image backup is ran. At 4:05AM, on
each Saturday, is ran a differential image backup. At 4:10AM every day,
is ran an incremental image backup. Backups will pend while a backup
job is currently running, so I don't have to worry about the incremental
running before or during the differential or the differential running
before or duing the full. While this means once a month a differential
runs on the same Saturday as the full, the differential will be tiny
because there will few, if any, files that have changed since the full
backup started. The dailies will also run on the same day as the
differential and full backups, but again there will be few, if any,
files changed on the overlap, so the incrementals will be tiny.

If you configured the customer's host to allow remote access by you, you
should be able to start a restore even if it results in you getting
disconnected. Many backup programs have a CLI (Command-Line Interface)
that lets you operate them from a command line instead of having to
delve into the GUI and know how to do a restore job. You could define a
shortcut that runs a command to restore from the prior or last image
backup to let the customer just use the shortcut instead of having to
bother you, but then how would you qualify your bill for restoring their
system? While you whine about your customers, apparently you rely on
them for your income, so them needing help puts money in your pocket.

Shutup10 nor any other utility nor performing all the actions you can
research online will permanently stop Windows 10 from updating.
Microsoft added scheduled events to reenable the wuauserv service should
you have disabled it. Some other services (I'd have to go look again)
will reenable the wuauserv service. You can try to delete files or
change permissions on them, but it doesn't last. Microsoft reads the
same articles that you and I can, and they eventually catch up. I gave
up trying to block Microsoft from reconfiguring Windows 10 by eventually
catching up with the latest tricks to undo them. At least with the 1903
build, the user gets a choice of when the reboot occurs to do the
install of updates. You can delay for up to a week. I delay for the
offered week, and then figure on scheduling some time before them to
research online the updates to do the reboot before then. Since this is
a business customer, they should be using the Pro edition which gives
them more control over updating. If they're using the Home edition then
they really aren't a business, just some guy from home running a wannabe
SOHO business while using the same computer to play his video games. Of
course, with the backups, I can step back to a prior state, but the
updates will come again. Yanking the LAN cable (I don't use wi-fi on my
desktop, but I could disable the connectoid) is the only way to ensure
Microsoft cannot eventually figure out how to undo your config, but then
you lose Internet access which is hard to live without these days.

Also, Shutup10 is not a resident program monitoring that all its changes
remain enforced. It is a static program, similar to MalwareBytes
Antimalware Free, that only checks the settings when it is run. If
Microsoft figured out how to undo any of the tweaks to kill the wuauserv
(and there's another service used, too, but I'd have to look it up), you
won't get Shutup10 to kill that new method until Shutup10 gets updated
to accomodate the new method and until you run Shutup10 again. You can
read https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10/changelog to see how often
Shutup10 gets updated.

Due to journaling, if the customer is using NTFS, I'm not sure a power
outage will kill or corrupt an in-progress update. As I recall when
that happened, the update got unrolled during the bootup phase.

Does this same customer turn the key to Off in his car while it is still
in motion because, gee, he can't get the radio working while driving?
He know he pulled a boner move. How is powering off his computer going
to let him use it anymore than waiting for the update to complete?
Computer off = no usability. Duh!

Since you posted 1-1/2 hours before I replied, likely you already headed
to the customer's site to do the restore, so my reply will be too late.


That was the case.

Thank you for all the tips!

In an ideal world, he do a Clonezilla every week. Not
going to happen.

On 10/7/19 7:12 PM, Eric Stevens wrote:
On Mon, 7 Oct 2019 12:58:12 -0700, T wrote:

Hi All,

Got an emergency call. Customer got angry at
an update and flipped the power off. Details
of what transpired are really sketchy other than
he has flipped the power off several times and
his business is down. And he is really angry.
I have to go out to his site in a few mintues.

Yikes

I printed out to take with me:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...covery-options

I take it that I can't a safe mode and "sfc /scannow" with
10?

After I get him going, I am going to ShutUp10 EVERYTHING
and no more updates EVER.

Any word of wisdom?

Yes: there is no point getting angry with a computer.


Or the computer guy.

I tell my customer with a good sense of humor to
take their right hand, make a first, hold it in front
of them about shoulder high, and shake it back and
forth three times, whilst accusing the computer's
parents of not being married.

But that joke only works if I know I can almost instantly
fix it.

:-)

On 10/8/19 12:28 AM, Ralph Fox wrote:
On Mon, 7 Oct 2019 12:58:12 -0700, T wrote:

Got an emergency call. Customer got angry at
an update and flipped the power off. Details
of what transpired are really sketchy other than
he has flipped the power off several times and
his business is down. And he is really angry.
I have to go out to his site in a few mintues.

Any word of wisdom?

I presume the customer got angry because the update was taking so long.

See my follow up.

He had customers standing in front of him wanting quotes
and invoices. It is understandable what he did, although
it royally backfired on him

When I moved from a SATA rotating HD to a fast NVME SSD, major Windows
10 updates went from 3 hours to less than 20 minutes. Windows updates
are no longer designed with rotating hard drives in mind.

You were lucky you original mechanical drive was GPT
formatted and booting off of EUFI when you cloned.

Or you started over.

Starting over is a good ting with Windows. It dumps
a lot of trash and bugs.


Persuade your customer to move to a fast NVME SSD, to avoid similar
incidents in the future.

I LOVE NVMe drives!!!! My Fedora boot up in eight seconds
after the LUKS password is entered. I have done Fedroa
upgrades on several computer. The NVMe and SATA SSD drive
ones take about 10 to 25 minutes. The mechanical drive ones
are about two hours.

He won't go for it. He told me to lock it down, which I did.

If he wants an update, I will burn a stick with the latest
on it and run it manually. I HIGHLY double he will EVER
request that, unless something critical stops work with
his 1803 build on his new computer.

AT LEAST I now have him backing up his specialty software
to a different drive.

What is with these software vendors that think it is a
good idea to use one of your four tires are your spare?

On 10/8/19 1:42 AM, Ken Springer wrote:
On 10/8/19 1:28 AM, Ralph Fox wrote:
On Mon, 7 Oct 2019 12:58:12 -0700, T wrote:

Got an emergency call.Â* Customer got angry at
an update and flipped the power off.Â* Details
of what transpired are really sketchy other than
he has flipped the power off several times and
his business is down.Â* And he is really angry.
I have to go out to his site in a few mintues.

Any word of wisdom?

I presume the customer got angry because the update was taking so long.

When I moved from a SATA rotating HD to a fast NVME SSD, major Windows
10 updates went from 3 hours to less than 20 minutes.Â* Windows updates
are no longer designed with rotating hard drives in mind.

Persuade your customer to move to a fast NVME SSD, to avoid similar
incidents in the future.

Does this not assume T's customer has a fast internet connection?Â* Most
of the speeds I often see mentioned newsgroups are not even available
where I live.


He has Spectrum / Charter. Around 100 Mbit down and
15 MBit up. It is plenty fast.

On 10/8/19 2:36 AM, Ralph Fox wrote:
I presume (rightly or wrongly) that the customer was angry because of
the length of time the customer could not use the computer at all.

Bingo!

T wrote:

In an ideal world, he do a Clonezilla every week. Not going to
happen.

Why does the /customer/ have to run a backup (every day would be
better)? That should be scheduled. Anyone who relies on remembering to
save an image backup before a large change is setup to forget to do that
task beforehand, and even small changes can have a large impact.

Backups should be schedule and not require ANY user intervention.