My mom got an automatic update to Windows 11, and it bricked her computer. It wouldn't boot; it would spin and then say it needed to go into repair mode, and then doing repair mode didn't do anything.
My initial thought was that the disk was hosed, but of course my parents had a bunch of priceless documents that were never backed up anywhere else, so I talked my dad through flashing a USB of Ubuntu so I could boot into it [1], mounted the NTFS partition, and ran smartctl and the disk wasn't reporting any errors. I found and ran a few other diagnostic commands and again, no errors. I was able to rsync the files to my home server, so nothing was loss. My initial assumption is that the Windows Update team didn't properly check to see if the CPU was compatible, and that maybe they were calling a newer instruction that wasn't on my mom's relatively old laptop.
After unsuccessfully trying to convince my parents to move to Linux, I talked them through flashing a USB drive with Windows 11 with an official image from Microsoft and using Microsoft's official disk flashing software, and we were able to install Windows 11, and as far as we can tell, it worked completely fine.
My hypothesis now is that whomever built Windows Update fucked up some kind of boot key and it was failing as a result. That or they just decided my mom should buy a new computer.
I was actually more annoyed after Windows 11 worked perfectly fine, not just because that means my parents aren't going to move to Linux, but also because that means that there's no technical reason that the computer should have been bricked, it was just the utter incompetence of Windows Update. Just to reiterate, this wasn't some hacked version of Windows 11, this was directly downloaded from Microsoft, flashed with their tools, with no adulteration on our end, meaning regular Windows 11 works fine. I highly doubt that my mom is the only person who has gone through or will go through this, and a lot of the people that will go through this won't have kids who are software engineers and probably be forced to buy a new computer.
Genuinely, how much e-waste is going to be generated by this forced update?
[1] Why the hell isn't there any kind of "Live USB" version of Windows? I mean officially, not some hacked thing? Why is the best way to fix Windows to use Linux?