I don't see it mentioned so I'm askin'.

booting in safe mode isn't working either ?

I wasn't sure it was giving me the option, will have to have a harder try later or tomorrow morning.

Of course some other problems to deal with reared their head before I could get back to dealing with this problem. IDK what it is lately, must have stepped on a black magicians toe in an elevator or something and got cursed.

Anyhoo, finally got back to it this afternoon. So yah, wouldn't go into safe mode easily... F8ed the hell out of it and it kept going into checking for problems/attempting repair from cold boot. Finally dug around in the advanced options after that failed and found the startup control section Aha, force it into safe mode....

So I get the startup screen with options, select safe mode and does it go into safe mode? Nope... well not exactly... it finally admits to having a massive failed update wedgie, stops trying to install them, deletes them, restarts into normal mode. It's alive. Yah so now I replaced the standard AHCI driver with the Intel one again and it seems to be running right. I wish I could lock it with a "Don't fuck with this fucking driver you fucking fucker or I'll fuck with you you fuck." option.

Postmortem, dunno if I caused that problem or not, or it was going to happen next reboot whatever, because MS is it's own worst enemy for reliability... douchenozzles.

There's a group policy for preventing touching drivers of specific devices.

Regarding data, presumably they should be safe when moved outside Windows' folders, so somewhere on root of the partition. Unless you format, of course.

Thanks, I will look into that.

Also need to look into my backup strategy which has been neglected for months, I had images pushed over network to a desktop and saved on offline HDD, but like I said, months old. Plus the motherboard on that desktop appears to have died so no longer on network. I had 2 different SATA/USB adapters I was previously using, but I discovered I was having some infrequent data corruption with them, which I hadn't pinned down to either the adapter, the particular port or machine I was using them on, so stopped trusting them altogether and have been trying to pick up a new one. Then I've got some Win 7 machines up still, but they've all got smaller HDD in which can't mess with a 500mb image, and/or they've got no sata port free. It's a real mess my state of tech at the moment.

I didn't even want to be locked into trusting a single windows machine for my important email, but I switched everything over about 6 years back when google was having copytroll issues and blocking ppls whole accounts left and right for very very slight or completely imagined offenses (2 secs of faint music from a car driving by on youtube kinda stuff) and there seemed too much tied into google for exposure to a random problem and getting locked out of your email. But it seemed okay until last year when MS started screwing around with outlook express, which seemed to work fine, but since they mess with it every month now, keeps crashing and lagging.

Another downgrade brought with updates: https://www.askwoody.com/forums/topic/clock-m … -in-windows-10/

So what's the plan for the future? Keep older Windows with disabled updates 'till it becomes ancient and difficult to use with updated applications and then grudgingly accept Linux? 😜

Though with help of ExplorerPatcher, I don't see the big calendar, but the old calendar with clock that also tells that the clock is about to move forward / backward (DST...).

Why is Daylight saving time still a thing? Another stupid tradition.

MS always seem to be funny about where they let you see a clock, for instance, I gave up trying to have the bouncing text screensaver showing a clock, because MS kept resetting it to default text every frigging update.

My luck with linux isn't any better, particularly in the last few years where they seem to have taken the constant urge to "be more like windows" to mean also break things every update. They get some component 95% there, then when you're waiting on that last 5%, the last couple of bug fixes or avoidance of workarounds, they replace it with a whole new thing that's only 80% functional. Then as you wait for that to creep up to 100%, something major might happen and set it back a few percent, or it might get nearly all the way there and get replaced entirely again. It's like trying to work in an office they are continually rebuilding around you, and you're sitting there one day, in the smell of fresh paint, thinking "finally!" then *BANG BANG BANG* "Oh, we decided we needed a door in this wall". Then elsewhere, it's like "The plug socket for my coffee machine has changed and it won't plug in any more" Devs/users "Oh, that has been deprecated." you: "So there will be a an adaptor or a whole new coffee machine?" *crickets* ... ... ... Then you ask on forums how do I get my "coffee machine" working, and they point you to how it used to simply plug into the wall 5 years ago. "But how do I do it NOW?" and they angrily go "This has been discussed many times, SEARCH" and the last discussion is 6 months before it got broken and then yours.

Anyway, I get as frustrated at versions of linux as I do at windows, the key to keeping anything going on linux seems to be single purpose machines, have one for websurfing, have one for admin, have one for games, have one for watching stuff, it seems like as soon as you try configuring something it gets in the way of something else and alters dependencies or needs updates that break other things. Getting everything working on one install seems unpossible.

I forgot, Prevent installation of devices that match any of these device IDs is the policy I had in mind: https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/146562-pr … ice-driver.html

Thanks.

Heh, it's soooooooooooooooooooooooooooo random that they randomly picked an Intel SATA AHCI driver as an example... 🤣

Just a thought: could the hard drive be flaking out ?

My wife used a Dell E5430 (same generation Intel CPU as yours, but possibly a different chipset) under Windows 10 until a few months ago and she never experienced anything like what you describe occurring occasionally. While the driver deletion might have made things worse in this, the fact that you needed reinstall the controller driver every so often feels suspicious to me.

It might be worth checking out SMART data for that drive using a bootable Linux distro before doing anything else.

It reports as healthy under several tools. It's been doing this some 7 years so if it was a sign of early death it's taking it's time about it. I do have a relative with an identical machine, with one difference, hers has a Seagate drive in, while this one has a WD, hers doesn't have this niggle, so I guess WD doesn't get on with the controller as well as the Seagate does.

BitWrangler wrote on 2025-04-25, 03:39:

It reports as healthy under several tools. It's been doing this some 7 years so if it was a sign of early death it's taking it's time about it. I do have a relative with an identical machine, with one difference, hers has a Seagate drive in, while this one has a WD, hers doesn't have this niggle, so I guess WD doesn't get on with the controller as well as the Seagate does.

Yeah, 7 years would be a long time to be going through death throws. For reference, my wife's machine had had a 250GB Samsung SSD , later upgraded to a 500GB one over a combined 5+ years without any glitches.

If your drive isn't too impractically big, maybe you could image it as a precaution and then try a repair install of Windows. I would make sure the controller is set to plain SATA AHCI mode in the BIOS first as Windows 10 should support that natively .

I can't count, it's 2019 it's been doing it since, so 6 years. IDK if it was 19H1 or some deferred process from an 18 release, but problems seemed to appear after it started then trying to "migrate" the driver. I don't know what it was trying to do, turn it into a DCH driver? But it is/was kinda simple in the first place, maybe it's about stripping a control panel extension out of it or something. Anyway, nothing in windows release notes that suggest heavy messing around with SATA or hardware HDD stuff around that time. So I keep going through the dance of "windows notices it hasn't messed with it" "messes with it" "HDD goes dog slow" "I delete driver (reverting doesn't work because it's the "same" driver)" "reboots using standard AHCI driver" "I reinstall plain original Intel AHCI driver" and repeat.

I am not entirely sure though if the slowdown happens soon after the driver migration "bad touch" happens or whether there's some other trigger that trips the driver over.