2020 has not been a good year for Microsoft updates. All the patches that the company has released throughout the year have come with all kinds of bugs and problems to users, from crashes and performance problems to worrying blue screens. On December 8, Microsoft released what would be its last patches of the year for the supported versions of its system. And, although we had one last hope that these arrived in condition, it seems that it has not been the case.
Two weeks ago, Microsoft released patch KB4592438 for Windows 10 version 2004 and 20H2 users. This patch fixed more than 100 security flaws (none very critical) throughout the operating system, as well as including the latest quality fixes to fix some remaining bugs and problems in the OS.
This new patch, unfortunately, did not arrive without problems: many users have noticed their slower PCs, the use of RAM and CPU has skyrocketed and even critical BSOD errors have started to appear in the system. And, when it seemed that there were no new problems, a new one appears, a failure that, in addition, can damage your SSD .
Checking for errors with CHKDSK renders the SSD unusable
This bug appears immediately when executing the chkdsk c: / f command from a CMD window with Administrator permissions. What this command does is scan the entire hard drive of the computer for errors and repair these errors immediately.
Many users have noticed that, when executing this command, their computers crash suddenly, displaying a blue screen with the error code ” Stop-Error NTFS File System ” and then automatically restarting. The problem is that Windows does not restart back to the desktop, but enters repair mode, generating errors in the Master File Table, and making it impossible to start Windows again.
Fortunately, these errors can be solved (at least, in most cases) by re-executing “chkdsk c: / f” from Windows repair mode, being able to re-enter the system.
This problem seems to affect only SSD users; conventional hard drives appear to be unaffected. In addition, it does not affect 100% of users, although it is a fairly widespread error.
Microsoft on holiday for Christmas
Microsoft usually fixes these problems with quality patches that it releases every month, the fourth week of the month. However, this time things will be different. As announced several weeks ago, the company intends to give its employees vacations around this time, stopping the development of all its systems and leaving it only on minimal services.
This means that, this month, we will not see a new quality cumulative patch that fixes this (and other) issues in the operating system. The bugs of the KB4592438 patch , including the latter when running the disk checker, will remain in the operating system until the arrival of the next security patches in January 2021. And we hope that, at least, the solution will arrive with them.