Category Archives: Windows 10

15 Feb

Windows 10 Bash Integration with Explorer

For many developers moving between development environments, it’s sometimes hard to leave the familiarity of Linux Bash commands. Fortunately, for those using Windows 10, a native Bash shell has made its way into the operating system. If you’re like myself you may have used the shift+right-click context menu to open Command Prompt windows at a specific location while browsing your file system in Windows Explorer. However, there isn’t yet the same thing available to open up the Bash shell at a given location in Windows Explorer.

As such, I’ve put together a simple registry script that adds the necessary entries into the registry to display a context menu when shift+right-clicking in Windows Explorer. You can view the code and run the script by downloading it from my GitHub here. If you’re not a Git user, you may download the zip file here.

Simply run the add_bash.reg file and you’ll be good to go!

20 Sep

Upgrading to Windows 10: Fixing the 0xC1900101 0x20017 Error

After some deliberation, I had some time this weekend to finally upgrade my computer from Windows 8.1 Pro x64 to Windows 10 Pro x64 as a part of Microsoft’s free upgrade offer.

get-windows-10

I had previously upgraded my laptop without a problem with the “Get Windows 10” app in the system task tray; however, on my custom-built desktop it said initially that critical Intel drivers were not yet available. A week later, it said that my computer was set to automatically login and that I may have problems with the installation process. Fair enough, I thought, while adjusting my configuration so that my password would be required on startup. However, despite restarting a few times the message didn’t appear to change to allow me to upgrade my system. As such, I decided to just grab the media creation tool from Microsoft’s website and start the upgrade myself.

The initial setup appeared to work fine. However, once the installation reached 100% and then rebooted my computer, I ran into a common, obscure problem many users online also have seemed to have:

0xC1900101 - 0x20017

Common solutions included:

I was skeptical of performing many of these solutions; however, I’ll admit I still tried most of them except for opening up my desktop to remove additional RAM which seemed too absurd for me.

My Solution

What I noticed when I ran the upgrade setup using the installation media I created on a USB drive was that the setup would reach 100%, restart, and fail to finish the operation. After failing, the 0xc1900101 0x20017 error showed once Windows 8.1 booted. However, the interesting step in-between the initial setup reaching 100% and the error message showing up was that my system would startup with the Windows 8.1 recovery environment:

windows-choose-your-keyboard-layout

I also noticed that for a brief moment, a Command Prompt window would open before the recovery environment loaded. This observation got me thinking: perhaps it is a problem in my BIOS startup settings. I changed my search query on Google and came across one solution that involved modifying the BIOS settings. One of the settings that the site suggested to change was to set a preference for UEFI first before legacy. I already installed my OS with that setting enabled so that suggested to me that the problem was likely to be related to the start process. As such, I disabled the Fast Boot option in my BIOS and disabled the Intel Rapid Start Technology. I tried the installation one last time, and to my surprise, once restarted, the Windows 10 setup finished successfully. Afterwards, I was also able to restore my BIOS settings to their prior state with no issues.