Microsoft's code quality might not be at its peak right now, but blaming them for what's most likely a hardware fault isn't very productive IMO.
From the article:
> It won’t get past the Snapdragon boot logo before rebooting or powering off… again, seemingly at random.
Random freezing at different points of the boot process suggests a hardware failure, not something broken in the software boot chain.
Power issues all day long. It'll be fine until the SoC enables enough peripherals for one of the rails to sag down.
That being said, it's a hell of a coincidence that it failed exactly when a software update failed.
Exactly. Did you notice the one comment on his blog? It's a Linux zealot saying "Linux".
It would be entirely unsurprising to me if this trashed UEFI for this particular ARM device, from firmware corruption.
My guess would've been SSD failure, which would make sense to seem to appear after lots of writes. In the olden days I used to cross my fingers when rebooting spinning disk servers with very long uptimes because it was known there was a chance they wouldn't come back up even though they were running fine.
Of course, it’s possible that the windows update was a factor, when combined with other conditions.
https://www.pcgamer.com/amazon-new-world-killing-rtx-3090-gp...
Come to think of it, maybe it was me. I might have trashed the MBR? I remember the error, though, "Non system disk or disk error".
Hardware is more likely to fail under load than at idle.
Blaming the last thing that was happening before hardware failed isn't a good conclusion, especially when the failure mode manifests as random startup failures instead of a predictable stop at some software stage.
Happens quite often
Sometimes it boots fine, sometimes the spinning dial disappears and it gets hung on the black screen, sometimes it hangs during the spinning dial and freezes, and very occasionally blue screens with a DPC watchdog violation. Oddly, it can happen during Safe Mode boots as well.
I would think hardware, but RAM has been replaced and all is well once it boots up. I can redline the CPU and GPU at the same time with no issues.
I swear I was doing just fine with it booting reliably until I decided to try flashing it over the SWD interface. But wouldn't you know it, soldering a resistor fixed it. Mostly.
I recently had a water cooler pump die during a Windows update. The pump was going out, but the unthrottled update getting stuck on a monster CPU finished it off.
Similarly, I'm constantly hearing about Qualcomm's renewed interest in Linux and this and that and how the X2 Elite will be fully supported but I have never known them to be like this. A decade or so ago we were trying to work for a school project on one of their dev kits and the documentation was so sparse.
Then I see that the Snapdragon X Elite comes in this Ideacentre stuff but looking online no one has gotten Linux anywhere close to as good as Linux is on a Mac M2. That, for me, is the marker. If a Mac can run Linux better than whatever chipset you've released, it's just not hardware worth buying. If you're not Apple, you have to support Linux. Otherwise, to borrow Internet lingo, you're "deeply unserious".
Almost certainly a soft hardware failure, likely the SSD.
I've run into a similar situation - except the culprit was Linux not Windows. Tossed the machine in a closet for a few months, when it miraculously started working again. Until it broke again a day and a half later. It's disk or RAM corruption.
Give it up dude, it's the hardware, but let not an opportunity to smash Microsoft go unfulfilled.
> I opened the system and reseated everything, including the SSD. No change. I even tested the SSD in another machine to rule it out, and it’s fine too.
But that doesn't mean it's not bad RAM, a bad SSD controller, who knows what... there are only a few of these boxes in the wild regardless, so it's unlikely it can be debugged :(
Laptops seem particularly susceptible to whatever (anti) magic Microsoft utilise for their update rollback process, but it happens to every device class seemingly at random. Besides the run of the mill "corrupt files at random in System32", which is common and simple enough to fix with a clean install, I've had a few cases where it appears an attempt at rolling back a BIOS update has been interrupted by the rollback manager and left those machines hard bricked. They could only be recovered by flashing a clean BIOS image with an external programmer and clip (or hand soldering leads), after which they ran without issue.
As much as it's valid to question the unconditional anti-Microsoft mentality, they are still far from infallible and from my experience they are getting notably more unreliable in recent years.
If you actually read the article, you'd know it wasn't. Besides, Windows updates can and do deliver firmware/bios updates.
https://canonical.com/blog/ubuntu-now-officially-supports-nv...
So there is at least one ARM devkit with long term Linux support.
Given the symptoms (random crashes not right away at boot), and given that qcom is anal about secure boot, my guess is that it's unlikely that it's a firmware (in SPI-NOR or wherever) corruption that initially caused this. Firmware is checked each boot.
Might be as simple as degraded capacitor, or something similar.
And I can imagine that it's not hard to destroy this kind of HW physically with a SW update. PMICs can often produce voltages way higher than Vmax of connected components. But it's unlikely that if bug like that happened, that it would only affect one devkit out there, and not a whole range of devices.
I would just completely disable Windows Update, act as if the computer is already compromised, and only do work where security is not an issue. That's the most "reliable" way to keep it working.
Of course, hindsight something something...
I haven't run windows update in like 20 years
I would replace your ram sticks. I had a similar mysterious issue on an old Intel nuc. Got some new sticks off Amazon and never had the problem again
The car would run fine once started, but the car just wouldn't start sometimes (quite modified so I knew the systems well). The started would turn as that was a simple relay, but all ECU controlled devices wouldn't trigger. Plugging into the ECU, no error codes and all looked normal.
Eventually we tracked the issue to some corruption in the ROM that was only getting read in certain circumstances, since the ECU stores maps for engine parameters based on things like pressure and temperature you might only hit the corrupted bits of a table in very specific circumstances.
Reflashed the ROM and all was good afterwards. The suspected cause of corruption was intermittent power supply that had been fixed a while earlier.
Security is not fluids. It doesn't naturally evaporate. So don't try to add like they're washer fluids.
Those low-level software and associated hardware don't take software overwrites very well, even today. They might have total cumulative max overwrites, or manufacturer supplied update codes can still be dubious. It's (not)okay if you are meaning it to be a tool for your planned obsolescence strategy, otherwise, just don't touch it for the sake of doing it.
You can also try to live boot into Ubuntu 25.04 arm64 since that iso has experimental snapdragon elite support and has some built-in drivers for storage and network - you can extract firmware from the windows drivers with qcom-firmware-extract - they recommend doing this from a windows partition which you should have (albeit possibly corrupted).
If that still fails - you have a ram issue as others have pointed out. I've had the exact same symptoms (hardware instability after windows update) and it was nvme ssd (an early samsung one) and ram, in both instances.
Not saying the windows update didn't also come with some junk firmware that got loaded into some of your devices, but that would be a distant diagnosis from ssd/ram (and many others would have seen the exact same thing during their update if it was that).
But, that said, it saddens me we've normalised "oh well" when it comes to kit. even dev kit. If MS can't manage release engineering to keep dev/test things alive, then it's not helpful to the belief they can do it for production things either.
I inherited an IBM PC/RT back in the 90s. It was well outside what most people would consider its support lifetime. IBM could not have been more helpful working out how to keep it alive. I suspect this influences why when I later had some financial authority I was happier to buy thinkpad, than any other hardware we had available: I knew from experience they stood behind their maintenance guarantees. The device was configured to run BSD, not the IBM supported OS of the day, made no difference. It was end of life product line, made no difference.
This was before Lenovo of course. But the point stands: people with positive support stories, keep that vendor in their top-set
I trust Microsoft 0% to keep developing Windows for it.
Either way, may the memroy of your Snapdragon Dev Kit be a blessing.
My ROG Ally ran fine on Windows 11 at the beginning, but a year later always randomly crashed, even when idle, on a fresh OS install. After switching to SteamOS it runs stable again.
Ref:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrA2Xe9f7e8 - https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/qualcomm-snapdragon-d...
There are ARM laptops out there from multiple manufacturers, and there is a SnapDragon 2 on the horizon.
Then I knew Windows ARM probably wasn't going to make it. Why any technical person would want a PC( not including Macs)that explicitly can't run Linux I'll never know.
Some of us like the experience of Visual Studio, being able to do graphics development with modern graphics APIs that don't require a bazillion of code lines, with debuggers, not having to spend weekends trying to understand why yet again YouTube videos are not being hardware accelerated, scout for hardware that is supposed to work and then fails because the new firmaware update is no longer compatible,....
Huh? https://www.phoronix.com/review/snapdragon-x1e-september
