alt Hacker NewsConsidering that you were seeing unpredictable behavior in the boot selector, with it randomly freezing, I would assume a hardware component (RAM?) kicked the bucket. If it were firmware corruption, it would consistently fail to present the menu, or wouldn't boot at all.
Microsoft's code quality might not be at its peak right now, but blaming them for what's most likely a hardware fault isn't very productive IMO.
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The update listed in the article contains two UEFI patches, intended for "handheld devices".
It would be entirely unsurprising to me if this trashed UEFI for this particular ARM device, from firmware corruption.
So the "hardware failure" happening exactly at the same time the Windows update installation failed are not related? That sounds like a one in a billion kind of coincident.
I'm not so sure, I've had a similar-ish issue on a W10 PC. I vaguely suspect a race condition on one of the drivers; I've specifically got my eye on the esp32 flashing drivers.
Sometimes it boots fine, sometimes the spinning dial disappears and it gets hung on the black screen, sometimes it hangs during the spinning dial and freezes, and very occasionally blue screens with a DPC watchdog violation. Oddly, it can happen during Safe Mode boots as well.
I would think hardware, but RAM has been replaced and all is well once it boots up. I can redline the CPU and GPU at the same time with no issues.
when something works flawlessly and starts to fail after an update (so no user actions there) this could mean that update made the hardware fail. For example overuse of flash in ssd (it's been already reported https://community.spiceworks.com/t/anyone-else-have-their-ss...) or reflashing a component too many times (simple error in scripts)
I would test the CPU cooler since the fans ran so hard. Temps ramp up around the login screen, then stay hot and reboots get unpredictable.
I recently had a water cooler pump die during a Windows update. The pump was going out, but the unthrottled update getting stuck on a monster CPU finished it off.
With the original Arduino Due there was some fun undocumented behavior with the MCU (an Atmel Cortex-M3) where it would do random things at boot unless you installed a 10k resistor. From booting off of flash or ROM at random to clocks not coming up correctly.
I swear I was doing just fine with it booting reliably until I decided to try flashing it over the SWD interface. But wouldn't you know it, soldering a resistor fixed it. Mostly.
Yeah, I agree. This just feels like an appeal to anti-Microsoft clicks
From the article:
> It won’t get past the Snapdragon boot logo before rebooting or powering off… again, seemingly at random.
Random freezing at different points of the boot process suggests a hardware failure, not something broken in the software boot chain.