I know most replies here will likely encourage Linux and I get it. If it were up to me it’d be done. The problem is I work from home and are bound to certain limitations.
So to the problem at hand, I hope to get some insight on:
The two culprits are bitlocker and Window’s gaming service/overlay not sure what actual name of it is without having the error message in front of me. I’m not nearly as irritated at the gaming issue as I am with the bitlocker issue because the bitlocker is causing random crashes forcing PC reboots.
Where I find my hands tied is for both scenarios, I have gone thru Windows Services, Gpedit, regedit, and admin powershell command inputs that all show have successfully terminated the bitlocker and gamepad functions from even being able to be initiated.
As for bitlocker specifically, I have never enabled, used, activated or even owned a version of Windows 11 that provided access to bitlocker services.
I didn’t know it even existed before the Windows 11 24h2 update. Neither issue was present before the update. Even went thru the steps back stepping the updates installed to before the 24h2 update.
So by all intensive purposes (lol) the PC is running on a Windows build before the update fucked it up, is running without any group permission, active services, or regestry settings that should allow bitlocker or gamebar to launch.
Yet here I am. Everytime I launch a game I have a popup that informs me there are no available apps to open the gamebar.
As well as almost every other day no matter what I’m doing or what I am in the middle of, my PC just shuts down and reboots out of fuckin nowhere.
When I check the event viewer, the “critical” error message just says “The system rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, crashed, or lost power suddenly.”
The two warning error messages that occur almost in conjunction to the reboot critical message are two identical error messages that state, “Bitlocker timed out attempting to enumerate bands during volume discovery on this hardware encrypting drive.”
Before i get to my questions, I would like to add I am also entirely exhausted of reaching out to microsoft for help. They are fucking useless and each ticket I’ve opened with them results in a redundant cycle that ends nowhere at the cost of hrs of my time sitting on hold or following their recommended troubleshooting suggestions that are just redundant to the previous attempts to help.
My specific questions are as follows:
1.0 Everything I google regarding bitlocker just returns bugs people experiencing from when the are trying to get bitlocker to work properly and not much for scenarios that want it removed completely from a system. Does anyone know of any recommened resources I can do some more learning on the matter?
2.0 Am I wrong to think that turning off, disabling and removing the means for these operations to launch/initiate/run in the background will also prevent the system from attempting to initiate those operations?
3.1 Potential work around I thought to try, any feedback is appreciated, if either of those event viewer error messages are actually telling me that I must install a bitlocker driver for the service to properly launch and the issue will work itself out.
3.2 The fallback plan is to reboot my approach completely and convert Windows 11 back to Windows 10. Have never done this extreme of a fix so any feedback is gratefully recieved. Does anyone have any goto resources for this procedure to help me keep from anything falling thru the cracks.
4.0 Last couple notes if it helps, another bug that I noticed but fixed is my one screen’s taskbar does this wierd shit where the whole thing gets super fucking tiny and just floats in the middle of the lower screen. The issue only stopped when I reinstalled the back ported Windows 11 24h1 version or whatever it’s called. Since being under the previous update version the taskbar glitch has gone away. Went thru 3 hrs of troubleshooting with Microsoft for this one and despite their most urgent attempts to prove otherwise, we came to the conclusion it was not the hardware, monitors or gou driver. It only happened to whatever monitor was assigned by the system to be considered monitor “1.”
Nothing here is life or death so I’m not overly worried but at the same time I’d love to get some insight into either end of this shitshow but to reiterate, fixing the bitlocker shit is enemy of the state numero uno.
Any and all input to follow will be so appreciated. Thank you to anyone in advance who made it this far thru this rant and replies. To them especially but also to anyone else that pops in, I’d also like to wish you all a wonderful fucking holiday season!
bitlocker.
it is part of windows, even win11 ‘home’ has some bitlocker functionality (although it may not be identified as bitlocker). windows may try to encrypt your system partition if the hw meets certain specs, but that can be turned off in settings. disable it/turn it off, and don’t use it if you don’t want to. don’t try to expel it from your windows install. if it’s not being used, it won’t bother you.
gamebar.
disable its kb/controller shortcut, disable its notifications, tell it not to run in background, tell it not to run at startup. don’t use it. it won’t bother you, either. i’ve literally never seen it on my 10 or 11 boxes (ranging from < 1st gen intel to zen 4).
imho you’re making the proverbial mountain out of a mole hill.
you’ve made other ‘modifications’ and ‘tweaks’, too. these kinds of changes/modifications/tweaks/whatever you want to call them, and the fallout from them, are not and cannot possibly be supported by microsoft or a pc maker, even if you were totally up-front about how and what you were messing around with. you’re coloring waaaay tf outside the lines, and it’s all on you–and only you–at that point. their only help should be to advise you to backup data, reinstall from valid media, and well–don’t do ‘it’ again or you may very well wind up in the same boat.
i’m sorry. i know this ain’t what you wanna hear. but that’s just how it is.
two huge suggestions that i have are:
first. make a backup image (i mainly use macrium reflect or clonezilla, but there are many to choose from) of your functioning system to an external before making changes, before feature updates, and before doing any weird shit to your install.
and secondly. don’t do shit like this on ‘work’ computers, even if you own them. do your work, and only your work on a work computer, do everything else on something else. if you rely on a pc to earn your paycheck, leave it tf alone (i.e. stay totally ‘inside the lines’ and ‘by the book’). don’t risk having a vital system out-of-commission because of a stupid screw up. if you’re a university student, i would suggest the same for schoolwork, too.
So my question for bitlocker initiating is that it is turned off in settings and disabled in regedit. That hasn’t stopped it from trying to run bitlocker. It also wasn’t originally on Windows 11 home which is what I’ve always had on this computer.
The PC ran perfectly with the adjustment I have made to settings and regestry/service/group edits. For months. It wasn’t until the Windows update in October that sent things into a spin. When I made the edits initially, I did have to restore the pc a couple times and turn some edits on and off to get everything running to the best performance possible. In regards to the work pc stuff, I’m guna be straight with you, its actually one of my personal pc’s but I included the bit about work hoping to avoid a flood of replies suggesting I move to Linux. I have a pc running Linux and have reasons to also have a pc running windows but didn’t want to have this post to shift focus to why Linux is better than Windows or why I’m running Windows.
Edit: forgot to add that I genuinely appreciate your input and agree with all of it. I am happy to provide any further (accurate) info for you if there is anything else I left out or distorted in my original post with my attempt to steer the replies away from a Linux praise thread.
My post won’t help you much, so read on only if you have nothing better to do.
According to my short “research”, these “features” are all integrated into one big steaming pile of crap with a ton of dependencies. Can’t remove one completely without fucking up the others, you can only disable it.
This hodgepodge of whatever the fuck they did likely means that most if not all of the shit none of us want are making calls to access the encrypted data through bit locker. No bitlockr, the calls get wrecked and the PC/laptop has a meltdown.
OS rollbacks usually fuck something up related to changes and features that don’t exist in previous versions, so best bet is a fresh install. Zero interest from the OS company to have you revert to a previous version, so any direct rollback feature is probably just lip service.
24H2 was a buggy mess throughout its beta and even at launch. Whatever the fuck is going on with it, nobody knows, not even its developers. So your only real hope of getting a bug fixed is if it gets on their radar and they’ll give a fuck about fixing it.
You’re fucking welcome! Happy holidays!
This filled in so many gaps in my ongoing understanding of the Windows update shitshow. A lot of it I strongly suspected but the fact you outlined them almost verbatim to what I suspected is enough for me to take as actual existing problems and the liklihood of them being addressed. Thank you.
Back up your files and let it perform a reset. Random crashes are not normal and could very well be a hardware issue. If it’s still happening after a reset and install of updates and stable drivers then you’re looking at hardware troubleshooting.
So I’ve done that twice and both times issues don’t come about until Windows update 24h2 is installed. That’s kinda the point too. If this update and subsequent updates are going to create or cause hardware issues then I will look into going back to Windows 10. I mean I built this pc a little bit after the zen4 AMD chips came out and bought the best tier of each piece of hardware in the build that was compampatabl with each other. Not the best I could afford, the best available. At most it’s a 2 year old build.
Any of these known issues?
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-health/status-windows-11-24h2
Thanks, but no, none of these apply. Unfortunately it seems like the issues that make these documents require the issue to have more severe consequences than either of mine currently have. My bitlocker crash and reboots aren’t actual BSOD crashes. They are just system reboots for bitlocker not responding once initiated. Or at least that is what I think is the case with the known issue wikis
I know most replies here will likely encourage Linux and I get it. If it were up to me it’d be done. The problem is I work from home and are bound to certain limitations.
Put Linux on your personally-owned computer. If your employer needs you to use Windows for your job, let them furnish you a separate computer for that purpose and support it.
None of this shit should be your problem.
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