Windows 10 update is reportedly causing system lag and serious crashes

[aum]

Blue Screens of Death make an unwelcome return

 

Windows 10’s latest cumulative update for December is causing some serious issues for those who’ve installed the patch, according to reports.

 

Windows Latest flagged up the problems with update KB4592438, which was pushed out to those running the October 2020 Update and May 2020 Update on December 8.

 

One stumbling block is that some folks are reporting installation failures, and this has been a running theme for some Microsoft patches throughout 2020, complete with the usual unhelpful and uninformative error messages (for example – ‘Error code 0x8007000d’ – yes, that old chestnut).

 

Arguably, the installation fails may not be such a bad thing, as some of those who have successfully installed KB4592438 are posting about serious performance issues cropping up on their PC, such as spikes in CPU usage when not much is running on the system.

 

A denizen of Reddit commented: “I am getting some weird spiking CPU usage after my update. Like shooting up to 100% up and down with just a browser open.”

 

To which someone replied: “After the Dec 8 update, my laptop started having lag spikes, while in game or on YouTube. It was working fine before the update, so I suspected it could’ve been this. I uninstalled the update and everything went back to normal.”

 

Serious crashes

There are also reports of the update breaking compatibility with old games, of folders getting stuck as read-only, and of Blue Screens of Death in that Reddit thread and on Super User, along with Microsoft’s Answers.com help forum where there are also further reports of system lag and general technical hitches (and even the odd tale of laptops being bricked, worryingly).

 

KB4592438 comes with a bunch of largely unspecified refinements, including measures to improve security with Microsoft Office products, and a whole bunch of other security fixes – but it seems to have some fairly nasty unintended consequences in some cases (and of course it’s far from the first time this has happened).

 

Source

[spudboy]

So, once again like 20 people out of a billion are having issues?

[SouthernStar]

3 hours ago, spudboy said:

So, once again like 20 people out of a billion are having issues?

Pretty sure if you were one of the 20, you would want it fixed?, think that's the right of every consumer 

 

 

[Karlston]

Windows 10 20H2: ChkDsk damages file system on SSDs with Update KB4592438 installed

 

In Windows 10 20H2 with installed cumulative update KB4592438, chkdsk causes massive issues. It destroys the file system during a disk check on SSDs, so Windows 10 can’t start after a reboot. Here is some information about the problem and the affected Windows 10 build.

 

I’ve been contacted by several German blog readers by email and via comments within my German blog (thanks for that). They all pointing to a strange bug, obviously brought to systems with cumulative update KB4592438.

The problem with ChkDsk

The problem was initially described by Nero24 in the German planet3dnow.de forum (the affected person contacted me via email). In a school, several systems with Windows 10 20H2 already installed should be manually updates to the current update status (Windows and Office updates). The administrator, who did the manual update install, decided to execute the following command after finishing the update installation:

 

chkdsk c: /f

 

The intension is to check the Windows drive for damage and (with the /f switch) immediately perform a repair. In the scenario described above, things went very badly wrong. The affected person had seven systems, that can no longer boot after the file system check including repair. The guy was able to prevent the re-boot from the other computers, after the seventh machine failed.

 

Stop error NTFS File System, Source: planet3dnow.de-Forum

 

The blue screen shown in the screenshot above appears with the stop code NTFS File System (it shows a NTFS FILE SYSTEM stop code, see here for an English version of the BSOD). The affected person was able to observe this on seven computers with Windows 10 20H2. When analyzing the affected disks (SSDs) on a working system, it could be determined that the logical Windows drive on the disk was detected only as a RAW partition. The /f option of chkdsk probably destroyed the NTFS file system.

 

Further analysis of the RAW partition with chkdsk in offline mode revealed errors with a corrupted ‘file 9’ and an error in the BITMAP attribute of the Master File Table. These could be corrected with chkdsk in offline mode. After that, the systems booted again after installing the SSD as a Windows disk in the original PCs.

Error analysis and condition

In the planet3dnow.de forum, the affected person gives some characteristics of the affected devices. Here is the relevant excerpt:

They are all Kaveri systems with ASUS A68HM-PLUS motherboard and Kingston SATA SSD running in AHCI mode with the Windows standard AHCI driver. At first I suspected a faulty TRIM behavior in combination with chkdsk and the fact that the system reboots immediately after completion.

 

But they are not identical SSDs. Most are Kingston A400s with Phison S11 controllers and 2D TLC NANDs, but there was also a Kingston V300 with Sandforce controller and MLC NANDs, which certainly has a completely different TRIM behavior than the Phison-fired ones.

Whether the hardware has an influence is currently unclear. Within my German blog a user reported, that the error didn’t occur on two systems with hard disks, but a 3rd system with a M2.SSD caused the BSOD as expected. The case was summarized on German site planet3dnow.de in this article. There, the affected person writes that it affects build 19042.685 of Windows 10 20H2. The cumulative update KB4592438 should be the culprit. The blog reader wrote to me:

Have you heard anything similar from your community in this regard? In the forum thread above, we were able to narrow it down quite well where it occurs and where not, but I would still be interested in external observations. 

After publishing the German edition of this blog post, several blog readers confirmed this bug. If you have further insights, please drop a comment. I will try to forward a link to this blog post to Microsoft’s developers.

 

 

Windows 10 20H2: ChkDsk damages file system on SSDs with Update KB4592438 installed