KB5077181 was released about a month ago as part of the February Patch Tuesday rollout. When the update first arrived, users reported a wide range of problems, including boot loops, login errors, and installation issues.
Microsoft has now acknowledged another problem linked to the same update. Some affected users see the message “C:\ is not accessible – Access denied” when trying to open the system drive.
It’s a feature.
ffs how can at this much further into Windows cycle, and we still have shit like this? I mean the main drive is the most important one, I can understand if this happens to Win 1 or 2 but after soo many iterations? Just no.
Huh, my computer doesn’t seem to be affected.
I’m using Arch, btw.
Fedora’s better ;) ~I posted this in a jocular mood, don’t take it seriously~
Seems like your pc isn’t affected because you don’t have a C drive? Try create a C drive and see if there’s an issue.
I think I’m affected because I can’t access the C: Drive.
I’m using Debian, btw.
There’s your problem. You should be using Arch.
I use slackware, btw.
I think I’m affected because I can’t locate a c: drive.
I’m using Mint, BTW.
I managed to park over half the c:drive. I drive an X5, BMW.
I can’t spot my c: from this altitude, in my G6
Microslop.
They need to rapidly reduce the complexity of their software if they want to get this under control. The answer is NOT to add more features, it’s to simplify things.
They aren’t capable of doing that.
Source on that is me, I worked for MSFT during the rollout of Windows 8 and the 360 red ring nightmare.
They’re internally wayyyyy too culty and cliquey.
Everyone has to do things the MSFT way, and the MSFT way is team leads all leading their own thing and arguing about why its so cool and necessary.
The culture is diametrically opposed to simplifying things and reorienting around a fundamentally minimized, more stable core system.
Everything has to be able to plug into as many other things as possible, which creates insane nested dependency loops and chains that they fuck up all the time.
The Red Ring of Death was around 2009 or so, Windows 8 rolled out in 2012. That was 14 years ago now.
- 2012: ~94,000 employees.
- 2026: ~228,000 employees.
The median tenure of employment at Microsoft is 5.3 years, so most of those 94,000 employees will be long gone by now.
Also, Satya Nadella took over in 2014 and made major changes to the corporate culture from the earlier Balmer era. Stack ranking was abolished, there were major corporate acquisitions that brought external corporate cultures inside (eg LinkedIn, GitHub, ZeniMax/Bethesda, Activision Blizzard, Nokia).
I have no idea what Microsoft’s current internal culture is like but I think your impression is likely quite outdated by this point.
I mean, do those headcount numbers count contractors?
V dashes? A dashes? Etc?
The majority of MSFT’s workforce has been temp contractors for a very long time, and they do everything they can to have as few actual employees as possible.
If your source is saying the average tenure is 5.3 years, no, no it is not counting contractors.
Beyond that, unless you have an actual source for the culture shift beyond ‘you think so’, I’m going with no, everything I’ve described has gotten worse.
That’s why I’ve, for years, been able to predict moves that MSFT would likely make, that people at the time think are ludicrous or incredibly pessimistic, worst case scenarios… and then they happen.
As an example, I was saying MSFT probably just set Xbox with impossibly unrealistic profit targets for the Xbox/Gaming division, to more or less intentionally downsize it and then basically kill it off, over time, while acting like that’s not what they were doing… I said that a good deal of time before the news broke, that is exactly what happened.
They are a gormless faceless machine that is unimaginably high on their own supply.
Given the amount of outright caste based racism I saw amongst Indian actual employees vs Indian contractors when I was there, where HR told.me that actually ‘that’s just their culture’ and that I was being racist for pointing out abusive managers literally screaming at their lower caste underlings, whom they had by their H1-B balls…
…yeah, I’m willing to bet it is now even worse.
I’ve also worked at other large corps, a place or two in fairly high responsibilty positions.
I’ve met a fair deal of the Seattle/Bellevue/Redmond upper management of various texh and other firms, and the thing they all have in common is an unimaginably inflated ego, elitist attitude, that propogates downward via basically an essentially religious level of respect for people in higher positions… its just expected to be shown by anyone under them.
They really are like the corpos from Cyberpunk 77, they just don’t have the nakedly open bloodlust most of those corpos do.
I mean, do those headcount numbers count contractors?
I linked the source for my information, feel free to dig into it for more detail.
Beyond that, unless you have an actual source for the culture shift beyond ‘you think so’
I literally said I didn’t know whether there had been a culture shift. Reread the last line of my comment. All I’m doing here is pointing out that your own view on the subject is likely very outdated at this point. There’s been enormous employee turnover, including right to the top CEO position, and other major companies have merged into Microsoft in the interim.
I’m willing to bet it is now even worse.
Based on?
I’m not doubting your previous experience. I’m just pointing out that it was a long time ago and a lot has happened since then, so I’d like to hear some more recent evidence.
outright caste based racism I saw amongst Indian actual employees vs Indian contractors
I worked at the Comcast Center back when Comcast was building a new skyscraper two blocks away. The reason for this new building was that the CC had become jam-packed with InfoSys contractors, like literally five or six developers jammed into one-person offices, floor after floor after floor. The executives – a majority of whom were Indian-American – wanted to see a lot fewer Indians around their headquarters (and they talked about this openly) so they built an entire new building to house them.
Why use their stock ticker instead of their name?
Force of habit, shorter to type, everyone knows what I mean.
EDIT:
It took me an embarassingly long amount of time to realize that does not work with 3RR.
That was the internal code in a fair number of processes, for referring to ‘The Red Ring of Death’, the 3 red lit segments of a 360 that means basically 95% chance its gotta be RMA’d, likely just wholly replaced.
That was the state of windows in 2005
Great idea, I’ll ask Copilot to do that
Never again, Windows.
There must be something really seriously wrong at Microsoft. I can understand that Windows patches are complex and that they might break some of those crazy things people are running on their machines. But how is a bug that is killing access to the C:\ drive able to get through testing? WTF are they doing?
It’s not as bad as that time they permanently deleted user documents and photos.
See they had this trick where if you didn’t have enough space on your drive to unpack an update, they’d just move your shit to OneDrive temporarily, then move it back when the update was done. Only they forgot to move it back, and lost it. Oops.
Seriously?!?! 😲
It’s going to come out that there’s AI in the code. And the code testing was done by AI, who gave the buggy code the green light.
Or worse: AI is doing the QA as well
We’re doing the QA.
“Code Testing” = QA
It passed the unit test, it must be good!
Quality Artificial Intelligence assurance
What QA? Microsoft’s QA was always the CEO demoing the latest repository head on stage.
They at least used to be embarassed by a live BSOD.
They don’t need testing because they tell the ai to not make any errors
And then the LLM says something like “You’re absolutely right, there was an error in that code that is clear and obvious now it has been pointed out and despite the fact you gave the instruction to make no errors. Is there anything else I can help with?”
… and they’ll be too blind to take that as the warning it is and continue to ask even more of the LLM.
my boss loves AI and he uses it for everything. he made some stats graphs and summaries, and he was bragging how he got AI to make them errorless: he tells it to check for errors and makes it swear it’s accurate… while we were looking at a graph where the y column numbers were all fucked up
Interestingly, AI is actually pretty good at making graphs, the trick is you don’t ask it to actually make the graph itself. Instead you have to ask it to write a python script to create a graph using matplotlib from whatever source file contains the data, then run that script. Same with math. Don’t ask it to do math directly, instead ask it to write a bash or python script to do some math, then run that. Still not perfect, but your success rate increases by about 1000%
Because of so much open source and stack overflow it was trained on.
But who writes bash scripts to do math?
But who writes bash scripts to do math?
A full script? Nobody. But you can just run it interactively on the command line, which a lot of AI clients have access to. bc works great for basic math in the shell.
That’s about 90% of what I use AI for right there: silly little bash and python scripts. A graph, some image compression, ffmpeg video shenanigans, the works.
It’s Microslop. This is what’s wrong. Also, that they fired too much of the testing staff in favor of (user-)testing rings.
No one smart is going into windows dev in 2026. It’s like working on IBM mainframes. Only people left to work are middle of the road new grads they hire and boomers who are retiring.
My company is starting to roll out having AI both put up PRs AND give code reviews.
I would not be surprised to hear Microslop is doing the same thing and having horrible results.
Amazing what happens when you try to turn your talent pool into lifeless casino monitors.
Probably AI code getting tested by AI.
Vibecoding. Microslop has peddled AI so much that they have gotten addicted to their own supply.
*Microslop
Let’s start calling it what it is
morged continvously
Some slop for you.
Some slop for you.
Some slop for you.
Anyone else want slop?
Can you still use the computer? Other than the home folder (or the user folder), I think it’s fine if regular users go a week without touching their C drive until Microslop fixes it (which they will, inside like a week).
I use Windows at work, and it’s fine. I do use the home/user folder just because it’s there and it’s how everything’s set up, but there is no other drive to use instead. If I were using it at home, especially if I had a laptop, I’d want the home drive to be on an SSD I could move between machines… maybe. But, I use Macs at home.
from the article
The issue appears mainly on Samsung laptops and can prevent users from accessing files or launching applications.
Having a computer that cannot launch applications, let alone access files, is basically the same as not having a working computer.
But it can boot into Windows, which is also on the C drive? So it’s not locking users out of the C drive, it’s locking users out of parts of the C drive.
The boot process isn’t an user process, Windows would still be able to use the C:/ drive for itself, for every other user software though, that’s another story…
So only the user process is locked out of the C drive, not the boot/system. Fortunately, the way Windows 10/11 works by default, if you sign into a Microslop account, it backs all that stuff up to OneDrive. At least your documents. And no one’s saying it’s not bad, it just seems like most affected individuals will be able to go about most of their day. I have a Mac, so I
don’t need to worry about any of thishave separate issues to worry about.Having OneDrive wouldn’t help as you still won’t be able to use programs as a user, which is pretty much the reason we use computers in the first place, this bug effectively makes whole computers glorified paperweight in the meantime.
laughs in Linux
I…. I can’t believe you are defending (or more accurately saying “it’s not that bad”) losing access to the root of your hard drive. It screams incompetence on Miroslop’s part.
And it screams incompetence on his part if he actually thinks this isn’t a problem.
Well I’m obviously not, I’m just saying, if the system wouldn’t boot at all, they’d lead with that. For most users, it won’t matter. For the more technical users, we’re either using Linux or macOS.
i put my computer stuff on the part of the computer where the stuff goes, losing access to the stuff on the computer would be a problem yes
Hardly.
The system drive (very usually C:/) is where the Users folder lies by default (and you can’t move it anyway IIRC), folder that contains stuff like the Appdata folder where… well… apps keeps their data like settings, history, backups… Most software will try to access it and would meet an “access denied” error.
This is also the default location for all the documents, music, videos, pictures,[…] folders (but you can change those though)
Basicaly you’d be limited to the “portable” versions of softwares located on other drives, which is not quite the norm on Windows.
Hmm… I should start updating my work computer since the “IT” got upgraded my pc to 11 to fix a problem that wasn’t fixed with the upgraded.
We just had this month’s Patch Tuesday and they’re still dealing with problems caused by last month’s?! I really need to try harder to convince my father putting Linux on his current computer is a better idea than buying a Windows 11 computer.
Ugh… I’m so tired of “microslop” and “AI slop”.
I’m not defending Microsoft in any way, but they were releasing buggy updates long before the rise of AI.
They’ve earned that name at this point
I agree, but if microslop can be yhe downfall of microslop I will jump on the bang wagon. I think they should add more IA. Did they try live GenIA update of the user system yet ? Sound a money making idea.
Are you having a stroke?
Yes but any specific part in mind ?
It’s because they got rid of testing and quality control. They are only doing minimal testing now in controlled environments while the world is messy.
You know what’s going on inside the large companies that are hoping to cash in on the AI thing? All workers are being pushed to use AI and goals are set that targets x% of all code written be AI-generated.
And AI agents are deceptively bad at what they do. They are like the djinn: they will grant the word of your request but not the spirit. Eg they love to use helper functions but won’t necessarily reuse helper functions instead of writing new copies each time it needs one.
Here’s a test that will show that, with all the fancy advancements they’ve made, they are still just advanced text predictors: pick a task and have an AI start that task and then develop it over several prompts, test and debug it (debug via LLM still). Now ask the LLM to analyse the code it just generated. It will have a lot of notes.
An entity using intelligence would use the same approach to write the code as it does to analyze it. Not so for an LLM, which is just predicting tokens with a giant context window. There is no thought pattern behind it, even when it predicts a “thinking process” before it can act. It just fits your prompt into the best fit out of all the public git depots it was trained on, from commit notes and diffs, bug reports and discussions, stack exchange exchanges, and the like, which I’d argue is all biased towards amateur and beginner programming rather than expert-level. Plus it includes other AI-generated code now.
So yeah, MS did introduce bugs in the past, even some pretty big ones (it was my original reason for holding back on updates, at least until the enshitification really kicked in), but now they are pushing what is pretty much a subtle bug generator on the whole company so it’s going to get worse, but admitting it has fundamental problems will pop the AI bubble, so instead they keep trying to fix it with bandaids in the hopes that it’ll run out of problems before people decide to stop feeding it money (which still isn’t enough, but at least there is revenue).
You’re spot on regarding how AI operates.
AI is stupid story time!
I recently helped a friend with a self-hosted VPN problem. He had been using a free trial of Gemini Pro to try to fix it himself but gave up after THREE HOURS. It never tried to help him diagnose the issue, but instead kept coming up with elaborate fixes with names that suggested they were known issues, like The MTU Traffic Jam, The Packet Collision Quandary, and, my favorite, The Alpine Ridge Controller Trap. Then it would run him through an equally elaborate “fix”. When that didn’t work, it would use the failure conditions to propose a new, very serious sounding pile of bullshit and the process would repeat.
I fixed it in about fifteen minutes, most of that time spent undoing all the unnecessary static routing, port forwarding, and driver rollbacks it had him do. The solution? He had a typo in the port number in his peer config.
I can’t deny that LLMs are full of useful knowledge. I read through its output and all of its suggestions absolutely would have quickly and efficiently fixed their accompanying issue, even the thunderbolt/pcie bridging issue, if the real problem had been any of them. They’re just garbage at applying that information.
Yeah, they don’t do analysis but can fool people because they can regurgitate someone else’s analysis from their training data.
If could just be matching a pattern like “I have a network problem with <symptoms>. Your issue is <problem> and you need to <solution>.” Where the problem and solution are related to each other but the problem isn’t related to the symptoms, because the correlation with “network problem” ends up being stronger than the correlation with the description of the symptoms.
And that specific problem could likely be solved just by adding a description of that process to the training data. But there will be endless different versions of it that won’t be fixed by that bandaid.
Now ask the LLM to analyse the code it just generated. It will have a lot of notes.
Not only will it have a lot of notes, every time you ask if to analyze the code it will find new notes. Real engineers are telling me this is a good code review tool but it can’t even find the same issues reliably. I don’t understand how adding a bunch of non-deterministic tooling is supposed to make my code better.
Though on that note, I don’t think having an LLM review your code is useless, but if it’s code that you care about, read the response and think about it to see if you agree. Sometimes it has useful pointers, sometimes it is full of shit.
That sounds worse than useless. It would be better to fail utterly than make up shit that you have to waste time parsing through.
So when do I stop asking the LLM to take another look? If it finds a new issue on the second or third or fourth check am I supposed to just sit here and keep asking it to “pretty please take another look and don’t miss anything this time”?
I’m not saying it’s a useless tool, it’s just not a replacement for a human code review at all.
As usual, the bug only affects a tiny subset of hardware and lemmy is pretending every windows computer got bricked
its not about the number of effected devices/people. Its about it demonstrating the bigger more structural problems getting more obvious every time one of these happen.
Security to some level is important, but whatever idiot at msft sold exec on “user access control” as a standard service really effed windows hard. Security types have a role in the world, but a lot of them are authoritarian idiots. One of those idiots wrote this patch, and msft was so used to UAC problems in everything, they just let it on through during testing.
