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Windows 10 once more in print condition: Microsoft applies out-of-band fix to Patch Tuesday cock-up

Alas, Storage Spaces still a bit poorly

Microsoft has addressed the printer issues introduced in Windows 10 with the recent Patch Tuesday updates while admitting that some Storage Spaces had also been borked by the May 2020 update.

While no timing is ideal when it comes to breaking printing, it's not a great look when many users are working from home, or schooling their little darlings, and so pressing dusty home printers into service.

To that end, an out-of-band optional update has been hurried out by Clippyzilla to deal with afflicted systems running 1803, 1809, 1903 and 1909 versions of Windows 10. "Other affected versions of Windows will have updates released in the coming days," the software behemoth added, so those with shiny new Windows 10 2004 and a seemingly dead printer have a little longer to wait.

The issue appears to be related to the print spooler, that thing Windows users have had to occasionally restart over the years to resolve mystery printer problems. In this instance, the spooler may vomit up an error or close unexpectedly when printing is attempted, even when you're printing to a PDF file.

Microsoft also acknowledged that some Storage Spaces configurations had also been borked by the Windows 10 2004 update, leaving some users having problems accessing their data.

While advising affected users to steer clear of the potentially destructive delights of chkdsk, the Redmond gang sighed that there was currently no complete workaround for the problem and they could only proffer some twiddling in PowerShell to set the afflicted Storage Spaces to read-only.

It's a little unfortunate, considering that Storage Spaces was introduced as a means to protect data as well as extending storage as disks were added to a PC.

Two or more drives are grouped into a pool from which virtual drives called Storage Spaces are created. Typically storing two copies of the data, the system should mean that a copy remains intact even if a drive fails.

Alas, it appears the feature had not been considered too closely by the Windows 10 2004 update, which has had a bit of an issue with Storage Spaces throughout its long gestation. Recent reports have added corruption issues to the woe.

The Storage Space technology will eventually replace Dynamic Disks, which is no longer being developed as of Windows 10 2004. ®

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