So the "hardware failure" happening exactly at the same time the Windows update installation failed are not related? That sounds like a one in a billion kind of coincident.

An upgrade process involves heavy CPU use, disk read/writes, and at least a few power cycles in short time period. Depending what OP was doing on it otherwise, it could've been the highest temperature the device had ever seen. It's not so crazy.

My guess would've been SSD failure, which would make sense to seem to appear after lots of writes. In the olden days I used to cross my fingers when rebooting spinning disk servers with very long uptimes because it was known there was a chance they wouldn't come back up even though they were running fine.

Over my 35 years of computer use, most hardware failures (very, very rare) happen during a reboot or power-on. And most of my reboots happen when installing updates. It actually seems like a very high probability in my limited experience.

Of course, it’s possible that the windows update was a factor, when combined with other conditions.

For all we know, this thing was on its last legs (these machines do run very hot!) and the update process might have been the final nail in the coffin. That doesn't mean Microsoft set out to kill OP's machine... Same thing could have happened if OP ran make -j8 -- we wouldn't blame GNU make.

This reminds me of the 3090 hardware problems being exposed by Amazons New World [1]. Everyone really wanted to blame the software.

https://www.pcgamer.com/amazon-new-world-killing-rtx-3090-gp...

I had a friend's dad's computer's HDD fail while I was installing Linux on it to show him it. That was terrifying. I still remember the error, and I just left with it (and Windows) unable to boot. Later my friend told me that the drive was toast.

Come to think of it, maybe it was me. I might have trashed the MBR? I remember the error, though, "Non system disk or disk error".

If had happened any other time, there wouldn't be a blog post about it and we wouldn't be reading about it.

I've fixed thousands of PCs and Macs over my career. Coincidences like this happen all the time. I mean, have you seen the frequency of updates these days? There are always some kind of updates happening. So the chances of your system breaking during an update is not actually that slim.

I think it's fair to say they're related, yes. But causality can well be the other way around — that Windows upgrade failed because of flaky hardware.

Two bugs occurring at the same time is definitely not one in a billion, and with billions of computers in the world, weird shit is going to happen.

> That sounds like a one in a billion kind of coincident

Hardware is more likely to fail under load than at idle.

Blaming the last thing that was happening before hardware failed isn't a good conclusion, especially when the failure mode manifests as random startup failures instead of a predictable stop at some software stage.

A software update can absolutely trigger or unmask a hardware bug. It’s not an either/or thing, it’s usually (if a hardware issue is actually present) both in tandem:

windows update just doing a normal write causing the active chunk of flash memory being used to hold something in the boot loader to a different failed/failing section

This happens all the time, people always doubt it - but the patterns are always consistent: large updates kill hardware that's in progress of failing

"Hardware failure" => "WinUpdate failure" => "Corrupted system" conforms the Occam's razor.

Like winning the lottery?

Happens quite often