A recently-found bug in Windows 10 has just been fixed by Microsoft, but at the moment it’s only available to people who signed up to the Windows Insider program.
The bug itself is particularly nasty, so it’s good that Microsoft hasn’t wasted any time fixing it. When accessing a certain location either using File Explorer or the command prompt, a hard drive could become corrupted – causing serious problems for users.
Microsoft had stated that, although people were seeing an error message saying that “The file of directory is corrupted and unreadable” when accessing the specific file or folder, the drive was in fact not corrupted, and running the chkdsk tool would fix the issue.
However, BleepingComputer reports that in its tests the drive did become corrupted, and Windows 10 was unable to boot. Nasty stuff.
The bug was severe enough that while people waited for Microsoft to fix it, some companies implemented their own fixes – Mozilla, for example, blocked Firefox from accessing the folder that causes the corruption.
Now, at least, it appears that Microsoft has found a fix. With Windows 10 Insider build 21322, if you try to access the folder (C:\$i30:$bitmap if you must know – but don’t try to access this), Windows 10 will no longer say the folder is corrupted, but will instead say that the directory name is invalid.
Having to wait
While it’s unlikely that people will come across this bug accidentally due to the obscure folder location, the fact that it can cause serious problems – and could be exploited by malicious users – means we’re glad Microsoft has found a fix so quickly.
However, unless you’re part of the Windows Insider program – which gives you early access to upcoming Windows 10 versions to help with testing – then you may not get this fix any time soon.
It doesn’t look like it will appear in the upcoming Windows 10 21H1 update, but hopefully Microsoft will release the fix as a separate patch soon. Until then, make sure you don’t try accessing the folder.
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