Titsup Windows Phone 8 orders user to cram 'boot disc' in mobe A Windows Phone 8-using wag claims he provoked his Microsoft handset into asking for an installation DISC - with a boot manager error message familiar to anyone who's wrestled with Windows NT. The offending boot screen At least it didn't do a blue screen of death The error is by no means standard and - we're told - only …
No RICHTO, we know why Windows phone manufacturers ("OEMs" in Microsoft corporatespeak) lock down bootloaders and try to stop people flashing their own firmware. It's because the licensing agreement with Microsoft requires it. Microsoft wouldn't want people wiping the virus off their new (subsidised) purchase and installing better on it. What would Microsoft gain from that?
> ...and you wonder why phone OEMs lock down bootloaders and try to stop people flashing their own firmware. It is to stop this sort of publicity caused by people messing around with the OS.
This would not be a problem on my phone. I could just use an OTG cable and plug a CD drive into it.
@JDX: You, sir, are a troll, though a troll with a very nice gold badge!
For once I'm going to give M$ the benefit of the doubt here: maybe there is some wag of a code monkey in the WinPho8 dev team who mocked-up this screen to be displayed on a boot failure likely to have been caused by tinkering with the standard boot image. Surely someone at M$ has a sense of humour...surely...
The fact you can scoop out an error message (regardless whether it's been hacked or not) that's designed originally for desktop OSes is pure laziness in my own opinion. To disguise it is worse. It really serves nothing more than some embarrassing headlines, but still; it's nasty to the common consumer user who'd be totally confused with such an error if one of the key files corrupted.
Even the title for the error page isn't centred. Sheesh.
What about over-the-air updates that could go wrong due to the battery cutting our or some data becoming corrupt during the download process? This is what I mean. You don't see Androids and iPhones chucking out random guzzle that consumers don't understand.
Flashing the ROM on a WP Phone is the same as asking iTunes to do a restore on an iPhone (to a certain degree). How can anyone defend the laziness Microsoft has showed here to tie up loose ends?
Yeah, I just don't use chrome. I've not had any other program crash the OS. I run Safari, firefox, Iron, Opera and sometime even IE and they all manage to run without breaking the OS. I guess those Google engineers are just really clever (as well as really funny!).
you are just talkin' mess.
Why would you spend the resources to take it out especially is the actual server and desktop OS still need that code? Why would you spend the time and money to remove a scenario that you can only get to by screwing with the boot loader? What % of smart phone owners do that?
You my friend would make a terrible dev manager and or PM.
Because android phones don't crash into those kinds of death screens....
http://instagram.com/p/UYNjOVHjD4/
and Apples iDevices don't either....
http://instagram.com/p/UYN-zoHjEC/
Perhaps it's simply because it asks for the disk, in that case...BFD. By the way those photos are from links in the comments from the page that you posted in another article Bob, but maybe you didn't read that far in your excitement to get another anti-MS comment posted. You (again) fail to mention this "true innovation" happened because they were pissing about with their phones and flashing firmwares.
It shows there is some code in there to handle errors that should never happen. How did Microsoft test that code? Are there any bugs in it? Even if you assume the code identical to and fully tested on other platforms it shows there is unreachable code that make your ROM bigger than it need be i.e. more expensive, slower and more power hungry (more cache misses).
Has anyone found any detail on what he was doing?
I can't find anything on whether he has played with the shipped ROM and found an error that shouldn't be displayed (so, hidden code) or whether he's shifted a ROM from a different product across, where the error would make sense.
@AC "Says to me that all those vicious rumours, dismissed by experts like RICHTO, that Windows had layer upon layer of old code lurking under the bonnet were all true"
How does it show that? All it shows is that there is some code in this part of the system which exists for both the WP, probably RT, Desktop and Server versions of NT.
In other news, MS make a big thing about the fact that it's the same core OS on each device.
"It shows there is some code in there to handle errors that should never happen. How did Microsoft test that code? Are there any bugs in it?"
They tested it by having it in the Windows source for the last couple of decades. #1 rule of large-scale software engineering is not to mess with code that doesn't need it. Do you really think it would be a good idea to fork the NT kernel just so that an error message you'd never see on a phone isn't included? Every little change like that exponentially increases the test matrix, making a future failure all the more likely.
"Windows8 is realy NT in disguise!"
I'm guessing that since this is about Windows PHONE 8, you mean Windows PHONE 8
And, so....?
So are pretty much all the other Windows releases, probably also including the ones most of us use on our Windows desktops.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT
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So he did not make the "recovery discs" most laptops ask you to make? That is much safer than a recovery partition (in case the hard drive goes titsup). Machines with windows pre-installed often come with a product code on the underside of the machine. Could this be used to get a reinstallation disk from MS (not likely I guess, but perhaps worth a shot)?
The OEM Windows key is usually on the PC case. In my experience of secondhand laptops - the OEM MS Office keys are never(?) attached to the PC case. If you do a key retrieval in order to reinstall - then the value that is found is often a generic key for that supplier. Trying to use that key causes the installation to fail "piracy" checks.
If your talking about the Recovery CDs I needed to recently needed to Recover my old Acer Travelmate 2000, cunningly labeled as "Recovery Disk 1 of 2" and "Recovery Disk 2 of 2" ... which fell over when it asked me to insert the "Next" Recovery CD after restoring 90% from Disks 1 and 2 ....
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No, they removed that in Vista already. Any Vista DVD can be used to re-install with an OEM product key, and even cross upgrades (32bit to 64bit or vice versa) are allowed as the key does not resolve the word length.
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Try this link :-)
You can download the ISOs from Digital River, you just need a legit key to be able to use them and they aren't limited to just Dell machines. If you Google it you can find out all sorts about reinstalling Windows with a manufacturer key and certificate, it's a great way of doing a clean install of Windows without all the extra stuff that the manufacturers install.
Rob
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Its not that he is messing, it is that the code is still from NT, shows windows can't code anything anymore without relying on bygone code that is, at it's core, now unstable in the world of hacking and viruses.
Then again tesco tills and cash points run on windows (I have seen the windows error reporting screens), that is more worrying than a phone OS I will never go near.
Of course, all the old instructions that computers used to use are now unstable. We have new instructions for new code that are much more robust.
If you were to take a modern os, hack around with an image of it and try and run it there is no way you could reproduce this sort of problem.
When oh when will we get an answer to the problem of code degrading over time?
Of course, all the old instructions that computers used to use are now unstable. We have new instructions for new code that are much more robust.
and the datasheets for old microprocessors are not there so much as to tell you how the things worked, but to wedge under the dodgy leg on their opcode tables.
Crap troll. When Linux is used people are building on a legacy. When NT is used it's "can't be bothered to write a new OS".
People who don't know the first thing about programming probably shouldn't weigh in on subjects they are embarrassingly ignorant of, especially when they are fans of a 25-year-old OS.
The part where a complete re-write of code to perform the same specified operations can be totally new, but still appear from it's inputs and outputs to be the same, but faster or to have had bugs fixed.
Here is how it works: Senior guy specifies how the code is to work, junior guy codes it up. Other senior guys aren't happy with the code, so a different junior guy re-writes it from scratch, but it still carries out the same task. Yes, part of my job is specifying code for junior guys to write.
"Then again tesco tills and cash points run on windows (I have seen the windows error reporting screens), that is more worrying than a phone OS I will never go near."
Heh, i managed to crash one of those back to the xp desktop, complete with windows error message. I kept jabbing the touchscreen until it froze playing a continual loop of the "please place item in the bagging area" sound at quite a volume. The assistant didnt see the funny side as she didnt know how to reboot it and had to put up with the sound for about 5 minutes until a tech arrived and sorted it out. She got really pissed off, probably not helped by me laughing.
I do wonder how secure these things are to tampering. Could a keylogger be installed by a corrupt employee to pinch cc details and pin numbers? I would like to think the payment side was isolated from the crashy insecure windows bit and i prey to god they are not internet connected in any shape or form.
"graphically demonstrates that Windows NT code still lurks under the surface of Windows Phone 8"?! how is it lurking? Isnt the idea of WP8 vs Windows 8 to bring about some kind of code parity between the two platforms? You make it sound like some kind of conspiracy that with some mucking about with the firmware that this device can be made to "reveal" what we all already knew?! "Popping the bonnet of my 2007 Ford Focus ST revealed a Volvo engine lurking underneath"... its not a conspiracy!!
lurking present participle of lurk (Verb)
Verb
1) Be or remain hidden so as to wait in ambush for someone or something: "a killer lurked in the darkness".
2) (of an unpleasant quality) Be present in a latent or barely discernible state, although still presenting a threat.
The poster of this article chose the word, not me. Sorry for actually knowing what it means without requiring a definition. The story is interesting and amusing but ultimately worded in such a way that the people who've hacked their phones into displaying this error message have uncovered something microsoft would rather have kept secret. This kind of laziness can lead to all sorts of histrionic over-reactions if enough people jump on the bandwagon.
So in your expert opinion the kernel of an operating system only does something when something goes wrong? Do you actually know what a kernel is or have you some strange delusion about a world war 2 battle field with a call for charge happening squared at hapless users?
So they didnt remove some text from functionality that while essential to the OS is never going to be seen by the end user in a real life scenario that doesnt involve modifiying the device in some way. Demonstrate to me that this can commonly occur on joe bloggs phone and you have a story worthy of the kind of ridiculous uneducated responses that this story is already generating.
This is not a WindowsNT specific error message, it comes up on Windows 2000, XP and Vista (haven't tried W7 and W8) as well if the startup fixer assistant can't be launched.
The other clues that this is not a relict from WindowsNT 4.0 should be the path of the missing files (which is 'Windows', not 'Winnt' as it was the default under NT) and the fact that it refers to an EFI boot loader (which doesn't exist for WindowsNT).
Because Android and iOS have only been around for a few years. The NT kernel has been around since the 60's and has almost a trillion dollars invested and hundreds of thousands of hours from the world greatest programmers, some have spent their entire careers coding the NT kernel.
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