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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