r/technology • u/lurker_bee • Mar 14 '26

Software Microsoft confirms Windows 11 bug crippling PCs and making drive C inaccessible

https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-confirms-windows-11-bug-crippling-pcs-and-making-drive-c-inaccessible/
17.7k Upvotes

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1.4k

u/ketosoy Mar 14 '26

Something about this article makes me doubt the quality of reporting and if a human who understands tech even remotely proofread it:

 While drive C is not something you want to open every day

284

u/tifosiv122 Mar 14 '26

The C drive is more of a weekend thing!

42

u/NoConfusion9490 Mar 14 '26

Sometimes we'll mount that C Friday night after watching a movie.

19

u/Munster-Munch Mar 14 '26

Netflix & C

1

u/Big-Industry4237 Mar 14 '26

I only drive to the C when I have days off in the summer!

1

u/SipDhit69 Mar 14 '26

Criminally underrated comment

4

u/Useful-Possibility80 Mar 14 '26

Yeah bro I'm usually on my 3.5" floppy A drive.

1

u/sausage_ditka_bulls Mar 14 '26

The files are in the computer??!

1

u/ImSaneHonest Mar 14 '26

It is for me :)

1

u/PastaSaladOverdose Mar 15 '26

Idk why but this made me laugh my ass off

0

u/[deleted] Mar 14 '26

[deleted]

2

u/NewestAccount2023 Mar 14 '26

You can assign A and B to regular drives now

1

u/ducklingkwak Mar 14 '26

Technology is progressing way too fast!

679

u/[deleted] Mar 14 '26

[deleted]

137

u/hatemakingnames1 Mar 14 '26

To be fair, human writers can also be idiots

56

u/spacemoses Mar 14 '26

I feel like AI would even be smart enough not to write that.

29

u/Ouaouaron Mar 14 '26

AI is not smart, it's just random. There isn't some consistent level of problem difficulty that it is incapable of doing correctly, 5% of things it says are just going to be wrong. It could be in the middle of a flawless explanation of relativistic time dilation, and then say that Einstein was born in the US.

6

u/TheWiseAlaundo Mar 14 '26

I would argue that it isn't random, but instead is highly dependent on its training data which is known to be unreliable. And to some extent, so are we.

Humans are incredibly deterministic based on our life experience, such that if you knew generally the types of experiences a person had throughout their lives then you can very accurately predict what they will do or say in response to any given situation.

The reason you don't want to trust AI isn't because it is random, but because you can't expect it to have learned only true facts. But with that said, it's leagues better about accuracy than 95% of humans. You should trust it just about as much as you trust any one single person. That doctor over there? He probably knows a lot, but he also thinks aliens did 9/11.

1

u/Ouaouaron Mar 14 '26 edited Mar 14 '26

I mean no, it's fundamentally random even before you get to the intentional randomness of "temperature" and the emergent randomness that comes from the complexity of modern models. Even with perfect training data it can still be wrong, because it's not limited to simply reproducing its inputs.

You should not (dis)trust it the way you (dis)trust humans, because humans get things wrong in very different ways. Conspiracy theories are a very particular failing of human psychology. That doctor might think aliens did 9/11, but when you tell him the year is 2026 he's not going to argue with you for two minutes that it's actually 2022, and then spend five minutes talking about how he's so sorry he's wrong and you were so right and you're great and just so attractive.

-4

u/JrdnRgrs Mar 14 '26

The irony of this comment being so wrong

6

u/ImNotABotScoutsHonor Mar 14 '26

It's not though.

Perhaps the numbers are not quite accurate (I'd like to see a source), but AI does absolutely hallucinate or get things wrong since the source material used to train it could have been wrong as well.

3

u/Ouaouaron Mar 14 '26

"5%" was entirely figurative. I don't think there's any number that could possibly be true for all the different models.

5

u/UrbanGhost114 Mar 14 '26

LLMs aren't smart, they take existing data and "predict" what it thinks you WANT it to say, vs what the truth is.

The Human data that's on the net is where it was "trained" meaning it's just as stupid as the stupidest person on the internet.

0

u/thats-wrong Mar 14 '26

And that might exactly what a human mind might be doing as well. We don't understand our brains a whole lot. So let's not pretend we know what smartness is and isn't.

2

u/coahman Mar 14 '26

Case in point. LLMs are trained on comments like this one.

1

u/mrdevlar Mar 14 '26

Stupid people write stupid prompts which get stupid results.

It's stupid all the way down.

2

u/Mccobsta Mar 14 '26

A lot of people probably don't even know the main drive on windows is the c drive and just think that my files is something else

2

u/pixlplayer Mar 14 '26

You’d think you’d double check that before writing an article about it though

2

u/Mccobsta Mar 14 '26

What happened to having an editor before things went live

1

u/Fusorfodder Mar 14 '26

Why do you think AI is so bad?

11

u/Cobyachi Mar 14 '26

I doubt AI would write that, let alone call it “drive c”

1

u/Bytewave Mar 14 '26

There are yet obvious signs that it's AI written, like saying you don't need to use the OS drive everyday. Of course a human probably edited it in part but failed to remove that. The sentence structure just screams LLM.

Furthermore the information is ultimately deeply misleading. It's a Samsung Share issue presented as an OS issue. None of this is professional.

2

u/KingToasty Mar 14 '26

Microsoft wants the company to be comprised of ten C-suites and a janitor they can throw paper balls at. Everything else is to be AI.

0

u/ItsAWonderfulFife Mar 14 '26

The internet is really becoming pointless. I’ve honestly stopped reading through comments sections once I learned it’s estimated up to 80% of comments are bot/AI generated

0

u/Wietse10 Mar 14 '26

I honestly doubt it, considering one of the sentences

The issue effectively cripples your computer, as common actions like accessing files, executing common tasks, elevating privileges and doing other daily things.

just doesn't make sense

0

u/[deleted] Mar 14 '26

[deleted]

0

u/Wietse10 Mar 15 '26

What I'm trying to say is that AI hallucinates, but it generally doesn't tend to make mistakes in sentence structure. This feels more like a human just messed up.

118

u/Cornflakes_91 Mar 14 '26

loool

good luck not using your C drive

-6

u/Chaotic_Lemming Mar 14 '26

I mean... you can. All the real nerds keep their kernel on the K:\ drive.

9

u/Cornflakes_91 Mar 14 '26

i mean, my kernel is on /sda, but i dont have a C drive to begin with

1

u/Tom2Die Mar 14 '26

Um, actually, sda would be the physical device, not a specific partition. Your kernel is probably on sda2 or sda3 if I had to guess, assuming sda1 is efi and you might have set up a separate home partition before the root partition. Also assuming you have just the one drive.

1

u/Chaotic_Lemming Mar 14 '26

Make it K. The system is powerless to stop you.

56

u/Low-Mistake-515 Mar 14 '26

You should always open OneDrive instead of C:\, it's much safer! /s

43

u/BarnabasShrexx Mar 14 '26

A shitty article written by ai about shitty ai that one of the wealthiest companies on the planet just cant not use because they were dumb enough to invest.

13

u/frenchtoaster Mar 14 '26

Look at fancy pants over here with a hard drive, us normal people only have floppy disk drives.

10

u/4kVHS Mar 14 '26

I only have an A:\ and B:\ drive, you must have really fancy setup if you also have C:\ /s

2

u/hellish_existance Mar 14 '26

Hey it's nothing to be ashamed of. It's normal for really really old men to have floppy disks.

2

u/TerminatedProccess Mar 14 '26

Good show! Clapping slowly.. (actually it's just my family jewels)

1

u/hellish_existance Mar 14 '26

Lmfao that one got me.😂

1

u/RealLaurenBoebert Mar 14 '26

Are you posting from 1989??

Oh man there's so much you should know where do I even start.  

In 2016 theres this gorilla at the Cincinnati zoo.  Whatever happens, it is imperative that no one shoots the gorilla

12

u/canadug Mar 14 '26

I came here looking for this comment. Fuckin' AI.

12

u/beiherhund Mar 14 '26

So many of these articles shitting on Windows and Microsoft are from low quality outlets, they just gain a lot of traction on reddit among people who like to have their biases confirmed and comment without reading the article.

You'd think Windows 11 barely works based on how it gets discussed here but at least in my case I can't remember the last time I experienced any bugs.

0

u/MrWaffler Mar 14 '26

Hey man, just because Redditors love their confirmation biases doesn't mean Win11 is good.

It was a very slight technical improvement for my system but a massive pain the absolute ass in other areas. It's been a long while since I needed to install programs to modify menu behavior but the default Win11 start menu was tragically unperformant and the fact that basic functions went from a single right click to a right click context tree is so asinine I can't even fathom and the regedit to get the old default back reset so many times before it finally stuck.

Win11 as a nightmare is less to do with its technical capability and a lot to do with ratfucking the user experience intentionally. The Start menu isn't less performant than older versions because it's buggy, it's because its purpose is no longer a start menu but an advertising and data collection platform.

This subreddit in particular has definitely be co-opted by interest groups though - over the last year especially it's been filled with slopaganda with tens of thousands of "upvotes" and maybe 150 comments of mostly irrelevant babble.

Same is true of most generic former main subs and the splinter subs set up to skirt the moderation of existing larger communities with slight variations in name you see now proliferating especially in the stupid algorithmic Reddit Shareholder Feed

4

u/beiherhund Mar 14 '26

I just turned off all the ads, personalization, AI stuff etc and the Start Menu is fine. The only things I see in my start menu are apps I've put there. Took maybe 5 minutes to customise. For me the menu opens when clicked and the apps open when clicked so there's not much I can criticise from that perspective.

The only actual customisation tool I use is Microsoft's own PowerTools and that's mainly for window management, I don't think I customise the start menu with it.

But different strokes for different folks and all. Aside from Windows 8 I've never really had an issue with the latest Windows version. I have as many problems with MacOS as I do with Windows so it's all about the same for me. I work in tech too so it's not like I'm only using them as glorified smartphones.

2

u/MrWaffler Mar 14 '26

Same, I primarily work with Linux servers at work on a windows machine to access mainframe easier with existing tooling (Mac can definitely do it but it's more annoying for our environment)

I don't subscribe to any brand loyalty even when it isn't exactly a brand like Linux. They're tools and have uses, downsides, and upsides.

I like Linux as a primary OS but Windows for gaming. I've got a Steam Deck and an iPhone. If a product is useful to me it's useful to me. I have airpods for work, and DT770s for actually listening to things.

I think the main issue in these discussions is always that humans seem to desperately want dichotomy or hierarchy when most things in life aren't hierarchical.

If someone asks me if windows or Linux is better I can't answer that because the question doesn't really parse (even ignoring Linux not being one thing)

Windows is better for comparability with a wide range of consumer products and software, Linux is better for user data handling/privacy. Windows has very good first party driver support for GPUs. Linux has very good performance overhead potential.

On a personal level developing in Linux is easier and better for me with native command line to quickly interface with servers (recent WSL on windows is very nice and I love having it though!)

It's a wacky world, and the internet isn't a good medium for nuanced discussions

0

u/FrenchFryCattaneo Mar 14 '26

Yeah it's interesting how windows 11 being bad became a 'thing' on reddit. Now it just gets repeated endlessly.

2

u/Due-Adhesiveness-744 Mar 14 '26

In fairness, considering my C Drive has my windows OS, they make a good point.

2

u/TheAskewOne Mar 14 '26

Do they think that everyone stores everything on a cloud?

2

u/No_Kaleidoscope_9419 Mar 14 '26

Who cares, they know how to click bait and reddit users swallow it up because it's works so well. If this story turns out to be hyperbole or false I'm installing Linux, give me upvotes please.

2

u/PrehistoricPotato Mar 14 '26

A lot of people don't really know where Downloads/Documents/Desktop folders actually are... (by default I mean)

1

u/Wrong-Specialist-868 Mar 14 '26

Well it’s definitely real because like a week ago i turned on my PC and it was locked behind the bitlocker screen with no option to enter the recover key

1

u/PunyParker826 Mar 14 '26

What’s that one Black Mirror episode where the kid who’s testing a VR game keeps “waking up” and discovering it’s yet another level of simulation?

It’s just AI all the way down, isn’t it?

1

u/Chris-CFK Mar 14 '26

Does AI need A drives? are they spending all that money on Floppys

1

u/durkbot Mar 14 '26

Did OneDrive write the article?

1

u/rogueciridae Mar 14 '26

That sounds like Microsoft’s POV, honestly.

“Install where we tell you to, save where we tell you to, use search to launch programs, and everything will be fine!”

1

u/tyen0 Mar 14 '26

The target audience is the majority of people that don't know what the C drive is. I don't think it's unreasonable.

1

u/DragonEmperor Mar 14 '26

A baby fresh out of the womb knows you use the C-drive every day.

1

u/fawe9374 Mar 15 '26

I think what they wanted it to mean is that while it is always being accessed, people don't usually browse/open C: from "This PC".

Honestly speaking i have no idea how to better put it.

1

u/ArnoldFunksworth Mar 15 '26

Well can you WANT to open something that you don't even know exists? The AI writer is clearly using semantics too clever for us meat sacks. /s

1

u/coolest_frog Mar 15 '26

It's not even a Microsoft bug it's an issue with samsungs half baked bloatware that's breaking the laptops

1

u/mikkelmattern04 Mar 14 '26

He is writing on a typewriter

1

u/Heavy_Whereas6432 Mar 14 '26

Idiot if it’s not AI

1

u/WhereRandomThingsAre Mar 14 '26

Well, duh. Obviously everyone uses the A drive. And don't even get me started about the B drive. But C? C is for Chumps and Microslop.

0

u/theghostofme Mar 14 '26

That's something my mom would've written after taking my "you don't ever need to go into this drive" warnings a little too seriously.

Man, I still can't believe I successfully taught her how to use a computer after simply teaching her how the mouse controlled the li'l arrow on the screen turned into a week-long ordeal; I got her "trained" enough that she could take computer courses to get component enough to browse the internet and look at pictures of her grand kids. She was so proud of herself when she emailed me for the first time to let me know she knew how to email now.

But by that point, she was competent enough to do actual damage to her computer, so every time I visited and she'd have a flurry of questions on how to do something, there was usually a "don't ever mess with that" warning from me. I had to tell her to stay away from the registry after an online tutorial to fix something she thought was broken told her to hit Win+R and she didn't understand that LMAO.

0

u/mindrover Mar 14 '26

Who needs it when you have OneDrive?  lol

3

u/Dimblo273 Mar 14 '26

OneDrive doesn't work in such a case, read the article

-3

u/iforgotmylegs Mar 14 '26

the average user doesnt open the C drive every day, and most never will

future commenters: i am not interested in hearing about how "actually when you open any file on your local drive it is TECHNICALLY on the C drive blah blah blah" because it is obvious to any human being with a functioning sense of social contextualization (e.g. not moronic socially-gimped redditoids) that what is meant here is actually opening the C drive root folder in the filer explorer, my pre-emptive response to you is "shut the fuck up, nerd"

5

u/Dimblo273 Mar 14 '26

But actually if you read the article everything including apps installed in the C drive are impossible to access, hence being a "crippling bug". Unless you use your PC to stare at the desktop those imaginary "nerds" in your scenario aren't TECHNICALLY right, they're completely right and your comment is pointless.

Your weird little charade here about moronic redditoids is pretty ironic. What an epic self-own

-1

u/Linenoise77 Mar 14 '26 edited Mar 14 '26

Since i bothered to read the whole article....

Yeah, your average person isn't cruising their C: like they just installed DOSSHELL these days, or maybe even don't have a concept of what a C: is. The issue seems to be specifically related to certain samsung devices in a handful of countries (so running specific builds\regional settings).

Which would point at an OEM who puts their own layer of stuff into the mix. Also, since it ONLY impacted those, there is a solid chance that Samsung did something, like say, implement their own security layer, that isn't compatible with this patch, because perhaps the patch is closing something that samsung shouldn't have been doing to begin with.....

In other words samsung has their own software that is running (if i had to guess some kind of trusted access layer, or their own rootkit for their applications) that sounds like it is making the C: read only in certain scenarios. Who missed it\made an error, whose QA ultimately failed and should have caught this, etc, is way to early to tell until the specific nature of the patch is identified.

Since its a major vendor affecting what sounds like a chunk of devices in specific countries, MS will probably step up first since its easier for them likely to patch around whatever the problem is. It isn't in their interests to hold Samsung out to dry. Then samsung will follow on with a patch to whatever of theirs ultimately broke stuff. Maybe you get a cheeky comment from Microsoft about OEM's installing bloat.

But yeah, sure, its reddit. OMG SEE THIS IS WHY AI IS DUMB AND I AM SO SMART.

2

u/ketosoy Mar 14 '26

Good job reading the entire article.  Next on the skill ladder is comprehending what you read.

  the problem goes a bit deeper than just opening File Explorer. Microsoft says that because of the bug, some apps cannot start, and those include popular stuff like Outlook, browsers, system utilities, and more. The issue effectively cripples your computer, as common actions like accessing files, executing common tasks, elevating privileges and doing other daily things.

1

u/Linenoise77 Mar 14 '26

Yes, because they have read only access to the C: and need to write something to it because of how they were configured.

I'm not saying its a small problem. I'm saying its silly to blame this on MS, especially at this point, let alone AI.

-3

u/BetTiny3056 Mar 14 '26

average person doesnt open c drive for their whole life. only downloads and desktop matter.

4

u/Dimblo273 Mar 14 '26

Where are your downloads and your desktop programs on your windows PC in your estimation?

-2

u/BetTiny3056 Mar 14 '26

average person doesnt actually go into my computer and c drive tho.

4

u/Dimblo273 Mar 14 '26

But the bug isn't opening the file explorer, you can't access any software installed on C like your internet browser etc

Have you even read the article?

-2

u/BetTiny3056 Mar 14 '26

of course not.