Recently I like many have upgraded from Windows 7 (pro) to Windows 10 by passing the much disliked Windows 8.  Whilst it has taken some to settle down with Windows 10 – the UI changes whilst good in some areas have niggled in others.

But I have learnt a nasty little lesson in the last 24 hours.  I always used to have Windows 7 configured to create restore points – so an app installation typically would also result in a restore point being established.  Well that I discovered appears to have been switched off as a result of the Windows 10 upgrade – so I’ve had to explicitly re-enable it. Fortunately I found this out as result of another problem that I managed to recover from.

As to my other problem, I am also disappointed with the way Windows 10 reacts.  This one is perhaps a little more unusual – I run my desktop with mirrored drives. Whilst I I haven’t switched my system disk over to an SSD (migrating a system disk still involves an OS rebuild – which I never seem to have time for) the mirroring was intended to do 2 things 1 resilience so if a drive lets go then I’m not dead in the water but also more performance as the OS should be smart enough to read from both disks.  However, every now and again when shutting down in Windows 7 (and Windows 10 I have now discovered) will lose synchronization.

Whilst a pain – and also a little unsettling as there is always the question of data corruption. Identifying the problem and resolving in Windows 7 wasn’t difficult – electing which drive image to boot from, then going into Windows management and ensuring disks were ok, and setting the resync activity off. But under Windows 10 – not so great. So you get stuck into a reboot error cycle with a volmgrx_internal_error.  I have a USB stick with a Windows 10 Recovery image – what a waste of space.  Having looked around on the net saw the usual guidance of get to a shell ruin chkdsk etc. Well getting to a prompt is fiddly, and chkdsk doesn’t recognize an issue!  Finally I decided to try the Windows 7 image you can retain when installing – and although slow booting compared to Windows 10. We’re in and see the problem – usual actions, a reboot and all is well.

So lessons, re-enable check pointing, create a restore drive image (probably easier to recover from).  Reconsider a simpler single SSD boot drive, and bite the bullet of a system rebuild.