[GTALUG] apropos of DCB's lightening talk on bad diagnostics, a Windows war story

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

A poet friend's Windows notebook ceased working and Windows could not get 
up again.  A couple of days work did not result in a working system.  He 
was going to solve the problem by buying a new machine.

I volunteered to attempt to fix his machine.

I investigated the system (using a live Fedora stick).  I found 
that his files were gone and that the disk wasn't 100% happy.  I fixed it 
by copying /dev/zero to the whole raw drive.  (There were 8 relocated 
sectors, not a strong sign that the disk is deteriorating quickly.)

Whereas before my fix, a short drive-self-test failed, afterwards it 
passed.

The next step was to make a bootable Win 10 installation disk.

A bootable Win 10 installation disk is not as simple as a bootable Linux 
disk.  It won't perform as a Live system.  It isn't made by dding a .iso 
to the USB flash stick.

On another Windows box, download the Media Creation Tool.  Run it, 
asking it to create an installation stick.  It downloads Windows, 
and uses the files to build the installation stick.

This failed for me.  I'm not alone.  There are many postings by confused 
users.  I found many many suggestions of work-arounds, but no convincing 
theory that any of them worked.

At the start of this thread, you'll see the truly useless error pop-up:

<https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/media-creation-tool-error-0x80042405-0xa001b/48b2c661-c065-4b1e-b103-d41d029dcb13>

	Windows 10 Setup

	There was a problem running this tool

	We're not sure what happened, but we're unable to run this tool on 
	your PC.  If you continue experiencing problems, reference the 
	error code when contacting customer support.
	Error code 0x80042405 - 0xA001B

There is no evident customer support.  Just fora full of ignorance.  This 
problem (or at least this symptom) has been around for years.

For no good reason, I reformatted the USB stick and ran the MCT again.  
And it worked.  At the cost of having downloaded all of Win 10 twice.  MCT 
is too stupid to save its work.

Evan may like Windows, but my modest experiences with it are 
often unpleasant.

Now I'm onto the pleasures of installing Win 10 on a slow machine without 
an SSD.  This is an area where Linux is much much more streamlined.