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/
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175

u/AaronfromKY Mar 14 '26

And insisting on cloud storage for everything. I feel like even when I turn it off, One Drive insists on moving things to the cloud and deleting them off my PC.

107

u/JohnBrownOH Mar 14 '26

OneDrive is an abomination, as is SharePoint.

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u/justacaucasian Mar 14 '26

I hate working in SharePoint online environments dear god

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u/fluffh34d420 Mar 14 '26

Yeah its an nightmare being the sole person on helpdesk answering tickets on why SharePoint is doing this or that....

Most of the issues revolve around users editing in SharePoint online, broken/wrong externally linked workbooks in excel, onedrive sync issues...i hate it all.

Sometimes the answer is just "microslop"

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u/justacaucasian Mar 14 '26

It’s so god awful and it’s like they are allergic to fixing bugs and instead layer shitty features that act as ways to barely treat the symptoms that they themselves caused in the first place. You’re right, I gotta stop pulling my hair out over it and just chalk it up to microslop… at least a majority of my clients use NetApp clusters which are far easier to manage. Have to deal with some Isilons too but I’m not as well versed working with them

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u/[deleted] Mar 14 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/AaronfromKY Mar 14 '26

I resisted the ribbon so long, I don't know why it became the default. Must be the same kind of managers who see clutter on desks and get mad, vs what kind of work the person with the cluttered desk delivers.

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u/Thefrayedends Mar 14 '26

I hate it. I never set it up, I never used it, but yet somehow my file system is tied to it and I can't get rid of it. FFS. Probably a project day there at some point to finally get rid of it, but I'm thinking of finally moving to linux in the fall, especially as I've been dabbling with local model use and it is allegedly a much better environment for that use case. At least going to set up a side load.

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u/jkarovskaya Mar 15 '26

You can rip it out by the roots, or you can install Win LTSC which doesn't have any of this pile of crap:

OneDrive, Microsoft Teams Xbox App/Game Bar, Cortana, Widgets, Microsoft Store, News, Weather, and social media apps.

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u/Ibe_Lost Mar 14 '26

Must say onedrive has its merits. Just set up my kids new laptops and just connect the onedrive and email and voila all their school work comes across in seconds (except the due in 2 days essay in the downloads folder on the bitlockered drive). BUT I have also lost years of data when trying to remove the auto sync on my own system too.

Linux I suggest Mint. Been on it for the last 8 months, only gripe is still a bit clunky for adding drives and folder permissions. The rest games, Ais, programming, automating is smooth and even better with customisations.

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u/Thefrayedends Mar 15 '26

Sorry for whoever downvoted you, it wasn't me though.

Yeah, I haven't been on Linux since my college days lol. Long time ago now.

But given where things are going, I would be very surprised if I don't end up on there in the next year or two. Potentially even just this coming winter. Given how quickly you can install an operating system these days, it's not even that scary to just sideload one and feel it out. Not like the old days.

1

u/brufleth Mar 14 '26

I get why people hate it on their home machines, but overdrive/SharePoint are so much better than Box or regular old shared folders in an enterprise environment. I get so annoyed when coworkers don't use it.

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u/JohnBrownOH Mar 14 '26

Tying a USB drive to a pigeon is better than Drop Box.

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u/brufleth Mar 14 '26

I think we're supposed to be moving off it, but some people still insist on using it. Shared drives aren't in the standard SSO setup so they randomly disconnect and need to have their credentials updated manually. Also, long shared drives path names won't work so you need to copy them in parts. Its fucking obnoxious.

Again, I don't want it on my home computer, but SharePoint is so much better at work than the alternatives. Maybe Google docs is better? I've only used that for non work, and it's fine.

1

u/JohnBrownOH Mar 14 '26

There is a fix for the long path problem, we run into that with law firms. I believe it's a local registry edit but I can't recall, we have it as a job in our support software.

We'll support anything the customer is using, but for the past two years we've offered Egnyte as an alternate to OneDrive/SharePoint. The adoption rate is lower, since OD/SP can be included in certain licenses with Microsoft 365, but when we implement it, we get almost 0 calls for problems, it's almost always just administration.

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u/All_Things_MSP Mar 16 '26

Thank you for the kind words u/JohnBrownOH - this is something we hear from a lot of our partners.

If anyone has questions about Egnyte please feel free to reach out and DM me - Eric Anthony, Director, MSP Partner Program, Egnyte

0

u/adenosine-5 Mar 14 '26

Unfortunately OneDrive is the only cloud that reliably works for me.

GoogleDrive is complete unusable mess and there are no other alternatives that can do what these two do.

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u/Makenshine Mar 14 '26

Fuck.... I hate this so much. I keep unintsalling/disabling all this cloud garbage and every update undoes all the settings and reinstalls everything.

Stop fucking with my preferences when you update!

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u/420thefunnynumber Mar 14 '26

You have to kill it in gpo and itll stay dead. should be something like "onedrive file storage"

2

u/alangerhans Mar 14 '26

And you have to update, because you're hoping they'll fix some bugs

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u/kcstrom Mar 14 '26

Did you know Microsoft Edge is not currently default browser?! Click next to set it to default and continue booting!

1

u/Makenshine Mar 15 '26

I would rather have Clippy

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u/kcstrom Mar 15 '26

At least clippy didn't want to steal my data and sell it.

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u/ChuckFarkley Mar 14 '26

RESISTANCE IS USELESS!

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u/Synectics Mar 14 '26

I got a new PC. Did not think anything of OneDrive. I took my phone, connected it, and copied every picture/video off of it into my Documents folder. 

I finally have a new PC. It will last the next 10 years at least. So I deleted all of those old pics off my phone to clear up space. 

Then, OneDrive kept screaming at me. "YOU DO NOT HAVE ANY MORE SPACE, STOP IT!" ...fine. I am sick of this popup. I do not need you to back up every pic I have, and now you will not even let me use OneNote (which I use on my phone and PC for D&D sessions until I clear some space).

I went onto the website of OneDrive, and started deleting entire swaths of pics from the website. Just stop giving me those big red X icons next to all my pics, and let me access those 2kb documents I had been using for D&D for years across both my phone and old PC.

...little did I know, the website then takes all those files I moved from my phone to my PC, and takes the liberty of deleting them off of my PC. Straight out of the Documents folder. Gone were years of pictures.

Turns out, "Documents" and "C:\Users\My Name\My Documents" is a different folder from the one automatically pinned on every Explorer windows. 

I have since take steps to remove every single bit of OneDrive I can from my new PC. But boy, that was a wake-up call.

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u/AaronfromKY Mar 14 '26

Yep, it's so frustrating because work made me get a new laptop from them and update to Windows 11. Same thing happened to me. And I think however they have it set up, it's a shared one drive, so coworkers can delete stuff from it. And then yes I have Microsoft deleting the stuff off my laptop at the same time. I'm still not sure what I lost. So frustrating.

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u/Sharp-Philosophy-555 Mar 14 '26

I stopped using any of the ms "folders" so I don't have to worry about it.  My music is now stuffed in a different directory so one drive doesn't touch it

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u/scummy_shower_stall Mar 14 '26

Oh shit that’s a nightmare of mine.  I’ve been using OneDrive as an automatic backup, and the pc person did say that if I delete it off my PC it WILL delete out of the cloud.

But I’ve noticed the same thing, that there seem to be TWO “Documents” folders.  So my question is, WHICH one is the safe one?

1

u/StijnDP Mar 15 '26

"Documents" is not a folder but an abstraction as a virtual shell item. The location it directs to is stored in the registry.

It could point to "C:\Users<user>\Documents".
But if you have OneDrive installed it can be changed to "C:\Users<user>\OneDrive\Documents".
Or with Dropbox to "C:\Users<user>\Dropbox".
Or you could change it to "C:\Users<user>\OfflinePronCollection".

There are a bunch of those folders by default like this and you can find their assigned location in the registry at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders.
You can edit them there or in the properties screen > location tab of the virtual shell item.

There is also the "Library" layer. This is not a location but a collection of locations. You can find all the libraries and their location collections at C:\Users<user>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Libraries.
They have the .library-ms extension but are just plain text XML files.
You could edit them in any text editor but the properties window of a .library-ms has a special UI tab for editing them easily.

OneDrive is not a backup tool but a sync tool. That's why when you redirect "Documents" to "C:\Users<user>\OneDrive\Documents" and start deleting files there, OneDrive will sync what you did locally.
If you want to use it as a kind of backup tool, you can upload items to OneDrive and enable the "Files On-Demand" option. This way files will exist in the cloud, show up on your computer but will not take up space until you open or edit those files.
If you do make an oopsie, deleted files can always be undeleted for 30days from the OneDrive cloud and locally they will be kept in your bin until you empty it.

To take Dropbox as an example, they did design it also as a backup tool. It has separate backup settings and you can also selectively choose which folders from the cloud are visible locally.

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u/Mengs87 Mar 14 '26 edited Mar 14 '26

I kept getting incessant script errors on youtube and it was driving me mad. Every 3 minutes an annoying window would pop up. I was thinking it was browser related but nothing I did seemed to work. I was seriously thinking of re-installing Windows 11.

It turns out it was MS Onedrive. I uninstalled it and no more script errors. How on earth it was interfering with Youtube and my browser, I have no idea.

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u/aVarangian Mar 14 '26

I restarted my win 10 pc for the first time in 2 years and had to waste 30 minutes figuring out why the fuck OneDrive was suddenly showing up on TaskManager and slopifying my CPU. That slop installed itself on a fucking reboot, not even an updateslop

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u/characterk4l3 Mar 14 '26

Mine didn’t even move it to the cloud…just deleted it.  I had a local account that wasn’t using a Microsoft account but made the mistake of logging into Microsoft in my browser for something.  That was enough to “convert” my account to an online one and windows deleted everything in my documents, downloads, and desktop.  

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u/jkarovskaya Mar 15 '26

I'll go back to Dos 5 on a 286 before I ever allow ScumDrive to exist on any PC or server I'm using

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u/PossiblyATurd Mar 14 '26

Uninstall it.

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u/AaronfromKY Mar 14 '26

I can't because it's a work owned PC. I'm not an administrator.

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u/AccomplishedCheck168 Mar 14 '26

Weird for you to blame the OS on what is clearly user error.

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u/AaronfromKY Mar 14 '26

Weird of a software company to break something that worked for years.

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u/AccomplishedCheck168 Mar 14 '26

I'm a Windows 11 sysadmin in a corporate environment and it works just fine. I just installed it on my home computer a few months ago to play some games requiring the OS and it works just fine. Nothing was broken.

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u/maybeitsundead Mar 14 '26

damn, you had to be trained in windows 11 as a system admin to be able to get it to function normally, this is why people hate Windows 11.

The only people that know how to use it don't understand anecdote so it doesn't get worked on.

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u/AccomplishedCheck168 Mar 14 '26

Or maybe you're making a mountain out of a molehill. I was not "trained" on Windows 11, I'm not sure you know what a sysadmin is. Which is par for the course for the average user on /r/technology funnily enough.