How I fixed a failed Windows 10 update?
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So, like many techies, we get asked questions all the time by
our friends, our families, and our neighbors. Couple of weeks
ago, a neighbor came up to me or gave me a call actually and
said, hey, my machine took a Windows 10 update and now
it's stuck. It's in the boot phase and it's been there for
hours. What do I do? So, long story short, I went down and
visited him and worked on his machine to get it working
again. I was successful. Rather than focusing on exactly what
was wrong with his machine. To be honest, we still don't know.
I'm going to show you some of the steps that I took to get
there. Some of the tools you have available to you if you
find yourself in a similar situation. So, here's my
Windows 10 home machine. The, as you can see, it's working.
Let's assume for a moment that it's not. I'm going to start by
rebooting it. And what's important about this reboot is
that at a certain point, as soon as it starts the boot
process, in other words, it's gone from the black screen or
bios screen or whatever to actually loading Windows
itself. I'm going to turn it off. Now, in the virtual
machine, that's a menu option I have. In your case, you might
long press the power button to make that happen. You can see
it's rebooting again and I'm gonna do it again. I'm gonna
turn it off again. This time When it comes back and when it
starts to reboot, you'll see that it is now in something
called automatic repair. This is the magic if you will that
gives you access to a number of repair tools including Safe
Mode. Now, it's starting by diagnosing my PC. All it knows
at this point is that something interrupted the boot process a
couple of times. Doesn't really even know that it's me. It's
just Hey, we Didn't boot twice in succession. Let's run some
diagnostics. At this point, it says, well, we didn't really
find anything but if you wanna just restart, we can try one
more time or we can try again. That's not what we want of
course. What we want are some of these advanced options. So,
that's what I'm going to click on. Now, once again, we've got
a couple of easy outs here. One is, if we assumed everything
was working, we could just continue and it would continue
to boot into Windows ten or at the other end of the spectrum,
if you were done or you wanted to give up or whatever, you
could simply turn off the PC at this point. Naturally, what we
want is in the middle, troubleshoot. Now, this option,
reset this PC is essentially a reinstall of Windows. In my
friend's case, that's not necessary. It was on the table.
Don't get me wrong. It's something that I knew in the
back of my mind we might need to use. We didn't and this is
where it would be. Once again, you've got the option of
resetting your PC with and without saving your data.
Hopefully, you already have things backed up so the
difference may not really matter to you but if you wanted
to reinstall Windows, this is the option you would use. That
obviously would be the moral equivalent of reinstalling it
from scratch and solve a lot of different problems in it's
configuration and other issues. Instead, we're looking for
advanced options. Now, in advanced options, we have
several different things we can play with. Startup repair, does
exactly what it says. It actually looks for things that
commonly prevents startup from working. The problem I was
facing with the Windows Update Failure didn't feel like a
startup problem. So, it's not what I used but if for whatever
reason, you encounter a problem starting up your machine, this
is one way to let Windows attempt to automatically repair
many of the things that are common causes of startup
failures. Startup settings will take a quick look at because
there are a number of things that you can do. This is the
gateway to safe mode by the way. You'll see that it's on
the list about halfway down. There are number of things you
can change. The catch at this point is that you have to
reboot once again to enter this particular mode. I'm not going
to do it. Again, it's Another option I had on the table when
I was diagnosing my friend's machine. It turns out that it
wasn't necessary but it is something that is useful to
know about. Very often you'll see that you get instructed to
restart in safe mode in order to diagnose particular driver
problems, video problems, whatnot. This is how you would
get there. We go back. There is of course the command prompt,
the Windows Command Prompt. This is not something I ended
up needing but once again, it's a valuable tool especially if
you're aware of tools that you wanna run specifically for the
problem you have at hand or if you've been instructed to run
certain command line tools to attempt to solve a problem.
System Image Recovery, this is the option to restore a backup
image you had taken previously. The catch, is that this is
Windows System Image. So, you, this only works if you had been
using Windows Image Backup. My friend did not. He's been
running Easus ToDo. On the table for ways to recover this
machine would have been to boot from the Isis recovery media
and restore an image from his Isis backups. We elected not to
do this. We ended up not needing to do this. If you've
been using Windows backup, then this is how you would restore a
Windows backup image. System Restore. I tried System
Restore. I don't like System Restore. System Restore failed.
It took, it time failing and by that I mean it offered me a
couple of different restore points to restore too. I chose
one that I thought was appropriate immediately prior
to the Windows update having occurred and I turned it loose
and it churned and it churned for quite a while and after all
of that churning, it said, sorry, System Restore could not
restore your system. It failed. That was both frustrating cuz I
was kind of hoping that this was the kind of a scenario that
a System Restore would recover from but also somewhat
validating because I have said many many times that I dislike
System Restore. This is exactly one of the reasons that I
dislike it so much. It has the promise of a solution. It says
there's a restore point and yet it fails to actually restore.
What that left us with was uninstall updates. Uninstall
updates while seeming a bit extreme when a Windows update
happens. It's seemed a logical thing to try at this point. The
issue was that the machine was working. It took Windows Update
and then it wasn't working. So if we can roll back or
uninstall the most recent update, that might get us a
working machine. Now, if you choose it, you have two
options. There are the uninstall the latest quality
update. These are the more frequent patch Tuesday kind of
updates that have to do with security problems and minor bug
fix is other small features and enhancements and then the other
of course is the latest feature update which is the update that
happens every 6 months or so that actually comes with a fair
amount of feature changes and other changes to the operating
system. This particular update that had just been taken was a
quality update. So, this is what I did. I allowed Windows
to uninstall the latest quality update. And you know what? That
worked. After running through the uninstalled process for the
various updates that had been installed, the system rebooted
and it rebooted back into Windows. Now, since I don't
have to do that on my test machine here, I'm going to let
the machine exit and continue to Windows ten. Because there's
one more thing that I think is important to consider if you
find yourself in this situation. So, let's review
what we've done so far. In my friend's case, machine had
failed after a Windows update. I was able to uninstall that
latest update and that got him a working machine. In a
traditional world, Windows update is still running. It's
very likely that whenever it decides to, it's going to
install that update again. It may or may not work. If it does
it the very same day or later that evening, then, it's almost
certain not to work and get us back to where we were begin
with. So, what I wanted to do instead was delay further
updates on his machine. The way I did that and even in Windows
Home, this works, you can go to updates and security and select
pause updates for seven days. In fact, you can say multiple 7
days and at this point, I've got it set for pause for seven
days, 7 days from now is 7/3. If I now say seven more
days, it goes up to 7/10. That's two weeks. Windows
update will not take an update for two weeks. This is also
exactly what I did with my friend's machine. I said, let's
just take a breather. Let's not take any Windows updates for
the next two weeks. As it turns out, that was probably a good
thing to do. The theory by pausing updates in the
situation like this after just having had a Windows update
caused failure is that you're probably not alone. There are
probably other people that have suffered the same problem. Not
many certainly wasn't headline making stuff but it happens.
The idea is that maybe Microsoft will notice and we'll
fix this update with another update. With something we've
heard of from time to time, you'll see news of a Windows
update coming out and then a couple of days or a week later,
they'll be, oh, by the way, here's another piece to the
update that fixes something that the update broke. 2 weeks
is a nice window to let things settle and after two weeks, the
machine would take updates again. If they failed, well, we
know we had a more significant problem and we would need to
decide what to do next. Probably, I would delay updates
even further or I'd consider reinstalling Windows. On the
other hand, there's a likely chance that the updates would
work and in fact, after leaving my friends home, after you
know, working on things for a couple of days, sure enough, I
saw a headline in one of the tech newspapers that said
essentially, yup, There is a bug in the update. It affected
so and so kind of machines. There's a fix for it. It's
getting rolled out right now. So, there's actually a very
good chance that the next time this machine takes an update,
it's going to work. So, that is the the process that I took on
my friend's machine and like I said, I hopefully I've exposed
you to a few of the options that you have available to you
simply by entering this diagnostic mode by again,
interrupting the process two times in a row. There are other
solutions that we could have used. I could have restored a
backup image. We could have poked around in safe mode for a
bit and seen if there was anything we could have done
there. The command line, I could have done some more
research into the specific kind of failure associated with this
Windows update and perhaps there would have been command
line tools to use and finally, and what I still have on the
back burner in case that next update continues to fail is I
could reset the PC which boils down to installing Windows from
scratch. So, I do need to close with one little confession. I
didn't really fix anything. The title of this article is how I
fixed a Windows ten update. I didn't fix anything. All I did
was work around the problem. The problem is still there.
Until the update itself is fixed by Microsoft, the problem
is still there. There was nothing I could fix to my
knowledge. I simply worked around problem and delayed the
update so that hopefully Microsoft would have time to
actually do the fix. From my friend's perspective, of
course, it was fixed because he had a working machine but from
my perspective, from a pedantic perspective, it didn't fix
anything. All I did was sidestep the problem and I also
wanna point out that by and large, Windows Update usually
works. It updates millions of machines every day and by and
large, they all work. Of course, there are always going
to be edge cases like my friends. That's why we back up,
that's why we'll learn about the tools we have available to
us to try and fix things when things do go wrong. Hope that
was helpful. I hope that gives you some insight into some of
the things you can do when things go wrong. For related
links, for updates, for comments, and more, visit
askleo.com/134428. I'm Leo Noton, Boom. This is
askleo.com. Thanks for watching.