[dba-Tech] Windows 10 Updates - Fun and Games

[Heenan, Lambert]

Here's another fine example of the trials and tribulations of Windows Update.

On the evening of March 5th, having left my Windows 10 box running unattended for a couple of hours, I came back to it to find a blue screen telling me that "Automatic Repair couldn't repair your PC", and I had the option to Shut Down or go to Advanced Options.


Naturally I chose Advanced Options and was presented with another screen with a variety of choices, including:

* Restart the PC
	- tried that, with no luck. Back to the same screen.
* Retry Automatic Repair
	 - tried that and it failed after a few minutes
* Reset the PC 
	- did not like the looks of that 
* Restore from a Restore Point 
	- That looked good as I did have some restore points. When I tried it, I was shown a list of available restore points, but when I chose any of them and hit the button to move on all I got was an error about some instruction referencing memory is some whacky location. In short Resorting was not going to happen.

I went around the options a couple of times, but after an hour had made no progress so I gave up and powered off, thinking  "looks like I need to dig out that Windows install DVD". Just for kicks and giggles I powered it up again straight away, and to my surprise and delight the thing booted up into the normal login screen. So  logged in and immediately created a new restore point.

At that point I powered down and went to bed.

Then on March 8th, having left the machine running and idle for a longish time the same thing happened.  Got the "Automatic Repair couldn't repair your PC" screen. This time however I was up and running in a few minutes as the restore point I created on the 5th was functional.

It seemed evident to me that I was falling foul of an automatic update that was happening during idle time. Having only Windows 10 Home I have essentially no control over the update process.  So I took a look at my update history and sure enough, on the 5th and 8th there were entries showing one of those cumulative updates having failed to install (forget the KB number, but I can post it later if anyone wants to know). 

Then last night, while looking into the situation again, I opened the windows update screen and saw that there was a new cumulative update dated March 9th awaiting download and installation.  So I thought, perhaps if I let that one get installed, being later than and so superseding the update that had failed twice, perhaps this new update will have had the bugs swept out of it. Sure enough, it did in fact successfully install without any problems. 

Pity the poor average Joe presented with this situation. I see lots of money being handed over to Geek Squad to sort this out for non-computer savvy users. And I wonder when something bad like this will crop up again.

Lambert