data loss

ZDNet’s recent write-up re‑surfaced a little‑known Windows trick: a hidden “Emergency Restart” buried in the Ctrl+Alt+Del (Secure Attention Sequence) screen that forces an immediate reboot when the rest of the system is frozen. The shortcut is simple—press Ctrl+Alt+Del, hold Ctrl and click the...

If a 2.5" HDD is placed very close (2 cm or 3 cm) to a large, switched-off 29" CRT TV, could this TV, due to its large and powerful magnets and coils, cause some degradation in the HDD's magnetism, leading to data loss or corruption and magnetic degradation?

A routine reinstall of Windows 11 turned into a catastrophic data loss for one user after automatic device encryption (BitLocker) locked two large backup drives and demanded 48‑digit recovery keys that the owner never saw — a vivid illustration of how “secure by default” design choices can...

A Windows reinstall that should have been routine instead turned into a data nightmare: a user reported two 3TB backup drives became inaccessible after a fresh Windows install when BitLocker — or Windows’ automatic device encryption — locked them and demanded recovery keys that the user did not...

Windows updates are meant to protect, improve, and future‑proof your PC — but there are four clear, pragmatic reasons you might decide to roll back to a previous Windows update, and knowing when and how to do it can save data, time, and money. Background / Overview Windows Update is the single...

Microsoft's fix for the Windows 10 October 2018 update fiasco was less a single patch than a two‑part response: an immediate halt and guidance to affected users, and direct recovery assistance via Microsoft support technicians who were equipped with specialized recovery tools to attempt to...

Phison’s latest public testing and community forensics have reframed the mid‑August Windows 11 SSD scare: what began as frantic reports that the Windows 11 August cumulative updates (commonly tracked as KB5063878 and the related KB5062660) were “bricking” NVMe drives now appears to be a...

A small Taiwanese PC‑building community may have just pulled a loose thread that explains a wave of terrifying reports about Windows 11 “bricking” SSDs: the drives that failed in public tests were running pre‑release, engineering firmware — not the production firmware shipped to regular...

Microsoft and Phison are publicly at odds over whether last month’s Windows 11 cumulative update (commonly tracked as KB5063878) caused data-loss and device‑disappearance issues on some NVMe SSDs — and the debate reveals a messy intersection of community test benches, vendor lab validation...

Microsoft says the recent reports that a Windows 11 cumulative update “bricked” consumer SSDs are not supported by its telemetry and lab findings, and vendor testing so far has failed to reproduce a fleet‑level failure tied to the August servicing wave tracked as KB5063878. Background The story...

Phison has publicly acknowledged and replicated a key finding first raised by the PCDIY community: a wave of disappearing and allegedly “bricked” NVMe SSDs linked in timing to Windows 11’s August cumulative update (KB5063878) appears to have been driven, in at least some test cases, by...

Microsoft’s August Windows 11 patch is no longer the prime suspect in the recent wave of “vanishing” NVMe drives — mounting evidence points to pre‑release controller firmware and supply‑chain provenance, not the KB5063878/KB5062660 updates themselves, as the root trigger in the cases...

Microsoft says its August Windows 11 security update (KB5063878) is not behind the recent wave of reports alleging SSDs and HDDs have been rendered inaccessible or corrupted, but the episode has exposed gaps in forensic clarity and left many users mistrustful of a conclusion drawn without a...

Microsoft’s audit of the August Windows 11 cumulative update has closed one chapter of an unusually noisy storage scare, but it has left behind a tangle of reproducible community tests, partial vendor confirmations, and unanswered forensic questions that IT teams and power users should still...

Last week’s viral panic about a Windows 11 update “bricking” SSDs has been louder than the underlying evidence — but it also exposed real, repeatable failure patterns that deserve careful attention from users and IT teams. Microsoft and Phison, the SSD controller vendor most frequently named in...

Microsoft’s investigation into reports that the August 2025 Windows 11 24H2 cumulative update (KB5063878) was bricking SSDs concludes, for now, that there is no detectable connection between the patch and the drive failures users reported — but the episode exposes how fragile trust is between OS...

Microsoft’s latest public update on the mid‑August patch storm is straightforward: after investigation, the company says the August 2025 cumulative rollup did not cause a widespread failure mode that “breaks” SSDs, but the episode still exposes fragile cross‑stack dependencies and persistent...

Less than two weeks after Microsoft pushed the August 12, 2025 cumulative update for Windows 11 (commonly tracked as KB5063878 for 24H2), a narrow but alarming failure profile began to circulate among hobbyist test benches and end users: during sustained large file transfers (commonly around 50...

Microsoft’s August Windows 11 cumulative update has ignited a fraught, still‑unresolved investigation after community testers and some independent labs reported that sustained heavy write operations could cause certain NVMe SSDs to disappear from Windows — and, in a minority of cases, become...

Phison’s latest test summary puts the disputed SSD failures tied to Windows 11 updates into a new, uneasy middle ground: vendors and Microsoft say they cannot reproduce a widespread “bricking” problem, while a small but alarming set of user reports continues to describe drives disappearing and...