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The "Joy" of Reinstalling an OS
3 years ago
General
Okay, first of all, this is a rather pointless journal. No big change in my life, no big loss or anything of the sort. Call it a "first world problem" if you will. I just want to vent out a bit, and maybe in the process show how my mind tends to do things.
Also, don't leave any comments about how my choices are bad and that I should instead be using some other system because it is superior or whatever, or the "evils" of corporation X. I am very stubborn, and it will take some *REALLY* big event for me to change. So any attempts to make me think otherwise will currently be a wasted effort.
Anyhoo... my current (6th gen Core i7) desktop PC is set up to boot between Windows 11, Windows 10 and Kubuntu (Linux). Until earlier this year, Windows 10 was the main OS, with me using Win11 to test a few things (via a trick to remove the CPU check; I have both Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 active), everything works fine and performance is hardly any different from using Windows 10. I have Kubuntu to test Steam games and other things (as to why that distro, because I do like KDE, and I've found other distros like Mint lacking, but that is my personal opinion). Earlier this year I decided to switch the main OS to Win11 because whether we like it or not, that's where things will go for Windows, and things like my Huion tablet, the scanner and my Logitech gaming keyboards have no drivers for Linux, so that precludes it from ever being my main OS.
The OS was installed in a SATA SSD with Win10 in an nVME drive, but after deciding to switch the main OS, I cloned the installs to effectively switch their locations. And last week I replaced the 256GB nVME with a 2TB drive, which also allowed me to remove two other small drives (where I kept my Steam games and 3D models) by creating separate partitions for those. So again, the install gets cloned to that particular drive. I've done similar clones in the past with no problems at all, and I don't have reasons to believe my problem was related to the latest one, but it could be possible.
So yesterday I restarted the computer from hibernation without any problems (I do when I have a lot of Firefox tabs open). Later on I noticed that my Signal desktop messenger refused to open. No error or anything, it just would not open. So I rebooted, and that is when things started to go south. Upon log in, OneDrive spits an error. Trying to launch Signal resulted in several errors. Windows told me I had notifications pending, but also refused to open them. And my sound card failed to work at all. Not good. I turned off the PC, then back again after a minute, just to make sure. Same problems. I rebooted into Windows 10 to make sure it was not a hardware issue; everything checked out fine. So I rebooted again, and it should have taken me back to Windows 11. Nope; computer goes back to 10. Apparently there was something that made the motherboard think that Win11 install was not good.
At this point I felt I didn't want to troubleshoot the problem, possibly spending hours only to eventually decide I needed to reinstall anyway, which is what happened when a Windows 8 install (I keep the previous version of the main Windows install for checking things out) crapped out and no amount of restore or reset would fix it. So I went ahead and backed up my data and big game installs -- I keep those in separate drives so an OS install only wipes out programs I would need to reinstall anyway, plus I know which files and folders in my C:\ drive I need to copy to preserve things like the mod order of my Skyrim install. And I only need to point Steam to the drives where I keep the games and they are available in less than a minute after first log in. The backup was just for a worst case scenario.
So after reinstalling Windows 11, all that is left is the rather tedious task of putting back all the programs I use. Again, first world problem. I guess one day I will actually go to the trouble of imaging the partitions needed for Windows, but at least I got rid of some crud from programs I was not going to reinstall.
Could it have been that my technically unsupported install corrupted itself? I'm not going to think there is some "evil plan" to slowly degrade unsupported installs; that sounds like some loony "tinfoil hat" or "conspiracy theory" material. I would think it was mostly a result of the cloning, or even a first indication that something in the motherboard is starting to show signs of failing (it is 7 years old at this point).
And if you read all this, I guess you are bored enough that this seemed interesting. :)
Also, don't leave any comments about how my choices are bad and that I should instead be using some other system because it is superior or whatever, or the "evils" of corporation X. I am very stubborn, and it will take some *REALLY* big event for me to change. So any attempts to make me think otherwise will currently be a wasted effort.
Anyhoo... my current (6th gen Core i7) desktop PC is set up to boot between Windows 11, Windows 10 and Kubuntu (Linux). Until earlier this year, Windows 10 was the main OS, with me using Win11 to test a few things (via a trick to remove the CPU check; I have both Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 active), everything works fine and performance is hardly any different from using Windows 10. I have Kubuntu to test Steam games and other things (as to why that distro, because I do like KDE, and I've found other distros like Mint lacking, but that is my personal opinion). Earlier this year I decided to switch the main OS to Win11 because whether we like it or not, that's where things will go for Windows, and things like my Huion tablet, the scanner and my Logitech gaming keyboards have no drivers for Linux, so that precludes it from ever being my main OS.
The OS was installed in a SATA SSD with Win10 in an nVME drive, but after deciding to switch the main OS, I cloned the installs to effectively switch their locations. And last week I replaced the 256GB nVME with a 2TB drive, which also allowed me to remove two other small drives (where I kept my Steam games and 3D models) by creating separate partitions for those. So again, the install gets cloned to that particular drive. I've done similar clones in the past with no problems at all, and I don't have reasons to believe my problem was related to the latest one, but it could be possible.
So yesterday I restarted the computer from hibernation without any problems (I do when I have a lot of Firefox tabs open). Later on I noticed that my Signal desktop messenger refused to open. No error or anything, it just would not open. So I rebooted, and that is when things started to go south. Upon log in, OneDrive spits an error. Trying to launch Signal resulted in several errors. Windows told me I had notifications pending, but also refused to open them. And my sound card failed to work at all. Not good. I turned off the PC, then back again after a minute, just to make sure. Same problems. I rebooted into Windows 10 to make sure it was not a hardware issue; everything checked out fine. So I rebooted again, and it should have taken me back to Windows 11. Nope; computer goes back to 10. Apparently there was something that made the motherboard think that Win11 install was not good.
At this point I felt I didn't want to troubleshoot the problem, possibly spending hours only to eventually decide I needed to reinstall anyway, which is what happened when a Windows 8 install (I keep the previous version of the main Windows install for checking things out) crapped out and no amount of restore or reset would fix it. So I went ahead and backed up my data and big game installs -- I keep those in separate drives so an OS install only wipes out programs I would need to reinstall anyway, plus I know which files and folders in my C:\ drive I need to copy to preserve things like the mod order of my Skyrim install. And I only need to point Steam to the drives where I keep the games and they are available in less than a minute after first log in. The backup was just for a worst case scenario.
So after reinstalling Windows 11, all that is left is the rather tedious task of putting back all the programs I use. Again, first world problem. I guess one day I will actually go to the trouble of imaging the partitions needed for Windows, but at least I got rid of some crud from programs I was not going to reinstall.
Could it have been that my technically unsupported install corrupted itself? I'm not going to think there is some "evil plan" to slowly degrade unsupported installs; that sounds like some loony "tinfoil hat" or "conspiracy theory" material. I would think it was mostly a result of the cloning, or even a first indication that something in the motherboard is starting to show signs of failing (it is 7 years old at this point).
And if you read all this, I guess you are bored enough that this seemed interesting. :)
I also keep almost all the installable program files and drivers in one USB drive (and categorized as well) so it makes reinstalling less tedious. The same drive also has ISOs for all Windows versions from XP and newer, as well as Kubuntu, and use a program called "Ventoy" to boot into any of the ISOs, so no need to constantly make separate bootable USB drives -- I just replace the corresponding ISO file(s) when a new version of an OS is released.
Culprit is usually poorly written code made through a script.
It's possible to do *simple* variations on this, like your little SSD comes up on C: and is C:\Windows and C:\Program Files, and your big hard drive comes up on D: and is your storage dump. But if you try to get fancier than that, NTLDR (the Windows boot loader) and/or the licensing gets extremely confused and it doesn't work.
Linux is a lot better about booting with "my boot partition is on the 3rd SATA drive, and everything else is a RAID-1 of the 2nd and 4th SATA drives, LOL". It may take you some quality time Googling GRUB config files, but you can make it do all kinds of weird stuff.
I dunno about your motherboard failing. The one motherboard I've had that I know failed would start out by booting just fine, but then programs would randomly crash, or it would reboot randomly. "Little" programs like Notepad with a five-line text file would never cause a crash or reboot, but "big" programs that used a lot of RAM (like FIrefox with a ton of tabs open) would do it pretty reliably.
When I was chasing the problem, I put a couple of different sets of new RAM sticks in it with no change. I finally pulled the motherboard out of the case and inspected it under a strong light and found that some of the capacitors near the processor socket (probably ones for the voltage regulation module) were starting to bulge out. A new motherboard made that PC run just fine for another decade. :D
One simple way to test your motherboard: boot to the Ubuntu side, open a terminal, and say
md5sum /dev/zero &
for as many cores as you have. That makes it try to checksum an endless string of null bytes, which will drive the CPU usage to 100% on one core. Let it rip like that for 30 to 60 minutes (the CPU fan will probably crank up), and if it doesn't crash, reboot, or otherwise act weird, your motherboard is probably basically OK.
I run 6 partitions -- C:\ is obviously boot and most programs that I would need to install anyway on any fresh install. D:\ is for the bigger Steam games that can use faster access. E:\ holds the smaller and/or less frequently used Steam games, other games and emulators. F:\ is all data (personal files and projects, furry stuff, music and video files). G:\ is the libraries for my Poser and Blender installs. And H:\ is where I relocated the swapfile, temp files, downloads, Firefox cache, and other stuff -- basically, just files that will be in there only temporarily, as it saves wear and tear on the SSDs.
Drives C, D and G are all in a 2TB nVME drive, E and F in a 6TB hard disk, and H in a 2TB hard disk. An additional 2TB hard disk is where I keep Kubuntu, and a separate SATA SSD for Windows 10. I choose which one to boot from by pressing F11 when the computer is starting or rebooting.
Boot will be longer and slower, but it might prevent your Windows installation from getting corrupted again, specially if you dual boot with Linux.