Information Technology Services

Classroom PCs and Flash Drives Unresponsive

Outage category: Hardware

Location: All Registrar Scheduled Classrooms

Status: Closed

Resolved Alert:

Initial Symptoms

Numerous reports of an unresponsive file explorer when attempting to access files, most notably on personal USB drives.

Root Cause Analysis

Cause

A few factors resulted in a corrupted installation of Windows 11, this includes a new Security Policy, corrupted base OS image, and Deepfreeze. This OS corruption resulted in several basic Windows services from being able to start.

Resolution

To resolve the issue, we had to uninstall Deepfreeze from all systems, direct Windows Update to Microsoft, and run several PowerShell commands to repair the corrupted OS files. After this was complete, we would direct Windows update back to our local WSUS, run Windows Updates, and reinstall deepfreeze.

Prevention

To prevent this from occurring again we will be updating the base OS image to clean up any corruption within the image. Scans will be performed to verify this. We have also pulled the Security Policy and will reassess the policy to ensure that there is no further impact.