24
Condor
5y

Just now I realized that for some reason I can't mount SMB shares to E: and H: anymore.. why, you might ask? I have no idea. And troubleshooting Windows.. oh boy, if only it was as simple as it is on Linux!!

So, bimonthly reinstall I guess? Because long live good quality software that lasts. In a post-meritocracy age, I guess that software quality is a thing of the past. At least there's an option to reset now, so that I don't have to keep a USB stick around to store an installation image for this crap.

And yes Windows fanbois, I fucking know that you don't have this issue and that therefore it doesn't exist as far as you're concerned. Obviously it's user error and crappy hardware, like it always is.

And yes Linux fanbois, I know that I should install Linux on it. If it's that important to you, go ahead and install it! I'll give you network access to the machine and you can do whatever you want to make it run Linux. But you can take my word on this - I've tried everything I could (including every other distro, custom kernels, customized installer images, ..), and it doesn't want to boot any Linux distribution, no matter what. And no I'm not disposing of or selling this machine either.

Bottom line I guess is this: the OS is made for a user that's just got a C: drive, doesn't rely on stuff on network drives, has one display rather than 2 (proper HDMI monitor recognition? What's that?), and God forbid that they have more than 26 drives. I mean sure in the age of DOS and its predecessor CP/M, sure nobody would use more than 26 drives. Network shares weren't even a thing back then. And yes it's possible to do volume mounts, but it's unwieldy. So one monitor, 1 or 2 local drives, and let's make them just use Facebook a little bit and have them power off the machine every time they're done using it. Because keeping the machine stable for more than a few days? Why on Earth would you possibly want to do that?!!

Microsoft Windows. The OS built for average users but God forbid you depart from the standard road of average user usage. Do anything advanced, either you can't do it at all, you can do it but it's extremely unintuitive and good luck finding manuals for it, or you can do it but Windows will behave weirdly. Because why not!!!

Comments
  • 2
    @RantSomeWhere oh, welcome back mate! 😁 How have you been?
  • 3
    Have any idea why it won't run linux? I remember having problems with a raid card a few years back myself, i called yagni on it after a few weeks of screwing with it.

    Disclaimer: i use linux but i could care less about fanboys. Use what works for you
  • 2
    @RantSomeWhere forever and ever, until this machine finally dies.. maybe (hopefully) in a year or two, so that I can finally justify buying a new proper one XD

    @PerfectAsshole not entirely sure actually.. I recall having been able to run Linux on it using an old Manjaro 4.7.6 kernel, which I could modify and use on the more modern upstream kernels. Problem is, I lost that config and the installation image that shipped with that particular 4.7.6 kernel. I've recently looked for it again into the Manjaro archives, but it doesn't seem to exist anymore. And even if it did, back when I used 2 1920x1080 monitors, my Intel graphics card would flicker a lot on the secondary monitor, and with my new 2560x1080 ultrawide, xrandr can't properly use both monitors at all. And the Nvidia dedicated card.. yeah... It just crashed the whole X server whenever I ran optirun/primusrun :')

    For all the crap that Windows is.. at least it properly drives both displays and boots into something quarter-assed but at least somewhat usable ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  • 2
    @Condor actually from what you just said i think i have had the same problem with an old laptop cause of a hybrid graphics card. I had to turn off the hybrid graphics using windows then installed linux and it worked. Linux catches hell with hybrid graphics even with proprietary drivers
  • 1
    @PerfectAsshole I didn't even know this was possible! My BIOS doesn't have an option for it, but it'd be great if I could make Windows configure the system to just use my Nvidia card only. Given that it's an AIO rather than a laptop, power saving on graphics doesn't matter much anyway. I'll be sure to look further into this!
  • 1
    @Condor mine was an ati/intel hybrid card. There's nothing in the bios to change it, hopefully if you search the card model it should tell you how to change it. I looked into the program used for mine and it was a few raw commands sent to the graphics card to turn off powersaving and force ati. Be nice if there was something like that in linux but at the same time i understand why there's not
  • 4
    @Condor have you checked which letters are available in the Windoozle Diskmanagement? (or alternatively in diskpart on CMD which volumes have assigned letters)

    It may be due to some already assigned letters you cannot see in Explorer. Some SD/multi card readers often have assigned letters for their different card interfaces but these drives are usually hidden in explorer when no card is inserted.

    In terminal:
    >diskpart
    >list volume
    Should show you what's in use
  • 1
    @PonySlaystation I've already almost finished my Windows reinstall (while doing my FOSDEM schedule so that at least there's something productive being done), so we'll never know.. but in the disk manager, I could only see my C: drive ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  • 0
    How much time did you spend troubleshooting this windows issue?

    How much time did you spend troubleshooting linux issue?
  • 1
  • 0
    @dontbeevil @irene feel free to tell me the steps of troubleshooting this thing, because Microsoft manuals don't seem very good. Ever tried looking up one of those stop codes and found usable resolution steps? Ever went into the Event Viewer, used its error codes and found proper resolution steps? But clearly I toss a Windows issue away after mere minutes. What if I told you that I spend the same many hours on Windows troubleshooting? Wouldn't that be weird?! Well you're partially right, it is weird because it always turns out to be a huge waste of time!
  • 0
    @irene 🤣

    Just FYI guys, maybe you already know, but starting from windows 10 1709, samva v1 is disabled in new installation because of samba security flaw (if you really need, ypu can enable from features)
  • 1
    @dontbeevil it is not a samba issue, they mount fine on other letters. But indeed I've read something about that as well, as I initially suspected an update to have broken SMB.. but it turns out to be something else. On the topic of SMBv1 being disabled now though, I think that's a great thing, and connections to legacy devices that stop working because of it might be better of being decommissioned anyway ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  • 2
    @Condor yeah was just an info for everybody to keep in mind... I think maybe was something like @PonySlaystation suggested, or some device reserved that letters
  • 0
    @dontbeevil probably yes.. I do recall having tried to mount some PSP iso (while I was pretty drunk so I can't really remember all the details of it), which Windows mounted onto G: or H: if memory serves me right - despite there already being a network share on it. Maybe that locked things up somehow.. as for E:, all I can think of is that I had linked to it as the location to read and write to in the libraries (Documents, Downloads, Music, Pictures, Videos etc), but I can't really see how that'd prevent the actual drive letter and associated file system itself from getting populated.. Well, currently there's no way to know for sure of course.
  • 2
    Try opening Disk Management and check if something is holding that letter/ forcing that drive have a static letter.
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