Not that you are at fault here, but I'd be very hesitant to install any system updates so shortly after they brick my computer, especially when Microsoft is involved.
Snapdragon is already canceled so I guess, they just don't care about this device.
It's Microsoft on ARM. Sad to say, but don't expect full support or quality update on this.
Considering that you were seeing unpredictable behavior in the boot selector, with it randomly freezing, I would assume a hardware component (RAM?) kicked the bucket. If it were firmware corruption, it would consistently fail to present the menu, or wouldn't boot at all.
Microsoft's code quality might not be at its peak right now, but blaming them for what's most likely a hardware fault isn't very productive IMO.
Almost certainly a soft hardware failure, likely the SSD.
I've run into a similar situation - except the culprit was Linux not Windows. Tossed the machine in a closet for a few months, when it miraculously started working again. Until it broke again a day and a half later. It's disk or RAM corruption.
Give it up dude, it's the hardware, but let not an opportunity to smash Microsoft go unfulfilled.
Not sure how much it could help, but is there a possibility you connect the SSD to another machine with the same architecture, run Windows install in it, then once Windows is installed and running, shut down, move the SSD back to the Snapdragon kit and attempt to boot? Just an idea...
Nobody has the time or energy to chase companies up for this stuff, and you know somewhere in the T&C they inserted a legal clause which is expensive to contest or un-contestable to liability.
But, that said, it saddens me we've normalised "oh well" when it comes to kit. even dev kit. If MS can't manage release engineering to keep dev/test things alive, then it's not helpful to the belief they can do it for production things either.
I inherited an IBM PC/RT back in the 90s. It was well outside what most people would consider its support lifetime. IBM could not have been more helpful working out how to keep it alive. I suspect this influences why when I later had some financial authority I was happier to buy thinkpad, than any other hardware we had available: I knew from experience they stood behind their maintenance guarantees. The device was configured to run BSD, not the IBM supported OS of the day, made no difference. It was end of life product line, made no difference.
This was before Lenovo of course. But the point stands: people with positive support stories, keep that vendor in their top-set
These devices are nightmares. I'm sure things will pay off at some point but this feels like all those years where everyone was cursing Nvidia on Linux and praising AMD's dedication to open source but my computer would constantly lock up regardless until I switched to Nvidia. There was this massive disconnect between my experience and what everyone told me was best supported.
Similarly, I'm constantly hearing about Qualcomm's renewed interest in Linux and this and that and how the X2 Elite will be fully supported but I have never known them to be like this. A decade or so ago we were trying to work for a school project on one of their dev kits and the documentation was so sparse.
Then I see that the Snapdragon X Elite comes in this Ideacentre stuff but looking online no one has gotten Linux anywhere close to as good as Linux is on a Mac M2. That, for me, is the marker. If a Mac can run Linux better than whatever chipset you've released, it's just not hardware worth buying. If you're not Apple, you have to support Linux. Otherwise, to borrow Internet lingo, you're "deeply unserious".
Sounds like this could potentially be some defective RAM. Memtest86 can boot from UEFI directly, so it should hopefully show up in BDS. A run should tell you what regions of RAM are bad, if any.
change the SSD and retry (the same ssd in another machine may not trigger the same error btw, this is not unilateral process of elimination) - those windows updates do a lot of disk writes and a small miss there can screw up an entire install since it shuffles things around in preboot environment (moving them on disk) and that can corrupt things and prevent a new install in the same way.
You can also try to live boot into Ubuntu 25.04 arm64 since that iso has experimental snapdragon elite support and has some built-in drivers for storage and network - you can extract firmware from the windows drivers with qcom-firmware-extract - they recommend doing this from a windows partition which you should have (albeit possibly corrupted).
If that still fails - you have a ram issue as others have pointed out. I've had the exact same symptoms (hardware instability after windows update) and it was nvme ssd (an early samsung one) and ram, in both instances.
Not saying the windows update didn't also come with some junk firmware that got loaded into some of your devices, but that would be a distant diagnosis from ssd/ram (and many others would have seen the exact same thing during their update if it was that).
are you able to stop at uefi stage and system is stable in bootloader stage? if yes than it may not be software issue. Others have covered checking ram and ssd. I suspect it could also be thermal or voltage issue.
Hopefully this serves as a reminder to decision makers with Web backgrounds to NOT push random non-critical _firmware_ updates without clear merit, or random updates in general.
Security is not fluids. It doesn't naturally evaporate. So don't try to add like they're washer fluids.
Those low-level software and associated hardware don't take software overwrites very well, even today. They might have total cumulative max overwrites, or manufacturer supplied update codes can still be dubious. It's (not)okay if you are meaning it to be a tool for your planned obsolescence strategy, otherwise, just don't touch it for the sake of doing it.
Only adding to this because it's likely a hardware failure, and I had a challenging time debugging a similar issue in an aftermarket engine ECU years ago. Thought it might make a fun anecdote.
The car would run fine once started, but the car just wouldn't start sometimes (quite modified so I knew the systems well). The started would turn as that was a simple relay, but all ECU controlled devices wouldn't trigger. Plugging into the ECU, no error codes and all looked normal.
Eventually we tracked the issue to some corruption in the ROM that was only getting read in certain circumstances, since the ECU stores maps for engine parameters based on things like pressure and temperature you might only hit the corrupted bits of a table in very specific circumstances.
Reflashed the ROM and all was good afterwards. The suspected cause of corruption was intermittent power supply that had been fixed a while earlier.
Soo.. Qualcomm can use a Windows drive to receive calibration data and other configurations. If you have a virus or something, you might brick a board, if its connected. We used 3-4 days in the factory to figure out why our boards were bricked. The PCs on the production line were all infected.
Seems like the typical Microsoft experience nowadays.
My ROG Ally ran fine on Windows 11 at the beginning, but a year later always randomly crashed, even when idle, on a fresh OS install. After switching to SteamOS it runs stable again.
30 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 43.2 ms ] threadRef:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrA2Xe9f7e8 - https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/qualcomm-snapdragon-d...
Microsoft's code quality might not be at its peak right now, but blaming them for what's most likely a hardware fault isn't very productive IMO.
Almost certainly a soft hardware failure, likely the SSD.
I've run into a similar situation - except the culprit was Linux not Windows. Tossed the machine in a closet for a few months, when it miraculously started working again. Until it broke again a day and a half later. It's disk or RAM corruption.
Give it up dude, it's the hardware, but let not an opportunity to smash Microsoft go unfulfilled.
I would replace your ram sticks. I had a similar mysterious issue on an old Intel nuc. Got some new sticks off Amazon and never had the problem again
But, that said, it saddens me we've normalised "oh well" when it comes to kit. even dev kit. If MS can't manage release engineering to keep dev/test things alive, then it's not helpful to the belief they can do it for production things either.
I inherited an IBM PC/RT back in the 90s. It was well outside what most people would consider its support lifetime. IBM could not have been more helpful working out how to keep it alive. I suspect this influences why when I later had some financial authority I was happier to buy thinkpad, than any other hardware we had available: I knew from experience they stood behind their maintenance guarantees. The device was configured to run BSD, not the IBM supported OS of the day, made no difference. It was end of life product line, made no difference.
This was before Lenovo of course. But the point stands: people with positive support stories, keep that vendor in their top-set
Similarly, I'm constantly hearing about Qualcomm's renewed interest in Linux and this and that and how the X2 Elite will be fully supported but I have never known them to be like this. A decade or so ago we were trying to work for a school project on one of their dev kits and the documentation was so sparse.
Then I see that the Snapdragon X Elite comes in this Ideacentre stuff but looking online no one has gotten Linux anywhere close to as good as Linux is on a Mac M2. That, for me, is the marker. If a Mac can run Linux better than whatever chipset you've released, it's just not hardware worth buying. If you're not Apple, you have to support Linux. Otherwise, to borrow Internet lingo, you're "deeply unserious".
You can also try to live boot into Ubuntu 25.04 arm64 since that iso has experimental snapdragon elite support and has some built-in drivers for storage and network - you can extract firmware from the windows drivers with qcom-firmware-extract - they recommend doing this from a windows partition which you should have (albeit possibly corrupted).
If that still fails - you have a ram issue as others have pointed out. I've had the exact same symptoms (hardware instability after windows update) and it was nvme ssd (an early samsung one) and ram, in both instances.
Not saying the windows update didn't also come with some junk firmware that got loaded into some of your devices, but that would be a distant diagnosis from ssd/ram (and many others would have seen the exact same thing during their update if it was that).
I trust Microsoft 0% to keep developing Windows for it.
Security is not fluids. It doesn't naturally evaporate. So don't try to add like they're washer fluids.
Those low-level software and associated hardware don't take software overwrites very well, even today. They might have total cumulative max overwrites, or manufacturer supplied update codes can still be dubious. It's (not)okay if you are meaning it to be a tool for your planned obsolescence strategy, otherwise, just don't touch it for the sake of doing it.
Either way, may the memroy of your Snapdragon Dev Kit be a blessing.
The car would run fine once started, but the car just wouldn't start sometimes (quite modified so I knew the systems well). The started would turn as that was a simple relay, but all ECU controlled devices wouldn't trigger. Plugging into the ECU, no error codes and all looked normal.
Eventually we tracked the issue to some corruption in the ROM that was only getting read in certain circumstances, since the ECU stores maps for engine parameters based on things like pressure and temperature you might only hit the corrupted bits of a table in very specific circumstances.
Reflashed the ROM and all was good afterwards. The suspected cause of corruption was intermittent power supply that had been fixed a while earlier.
https://canonical.com/blog/ubuntu-now-officially-supports-nv...
So there is at least one ARM devkit with long term Linux support.
My ROG Ally ran fine on Windows 11 at the beginning, but a year later always randomly crashed, even when idle, on a fresh OS install. After switching to SteamOS it runs stable again.