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Comment by BaculumMeumEst | Hacker News Reader

My Windows install is stuck in a boot loop like this - it spends 10 minutes trying to update and then fails, except maybe 1/3 times it then boots normally. I don't even try to do anything about it, I just marvel at it.

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I have a Thinkpad that did something like this, it would try to install updates, fail and eventually boot into some kind of recovery wizard that demanded the bitlocker key. That wizard wasn't able to actually fix anything either but after failing a few times the system finally would uninstall the update. The whole process took over an hour with zero feedback.

I had to switch to Linux just to get a machine I could rely on.

Last time I saw a computer do that it was due to bad memory sticks.

Do you dual boot? That's what mine did when the efi partition was too small for grub and windows' bootloader

Yeah, I dual boot. I think my efi partition is around 100mb. I forget if Arch puts just one backup kernel in there, but I feel like I saw a lot of garbage in there once that I had to clear out. Maybe that's the problem, will investigate, thanks.

Yeah, 100mb has been insufficient for some windows updates for me in the past. New windows installs create a 500mb EFI, but Windows 7/8 created a 100mb EFI and kept it if updated to Windows 10. Unfortunately resizing it is a pain, as the EFI partition is normally before your Windows partition.

Yeah, it turns out applying updates during boot is bad design. I'm sure plenty of people at MS realise it is, but I guess they don't care enough to fix it.

Windows can’t replace running executables, so needs to reboot. Fundamental design not easily changed.

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