21H2 is finally out

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https://twitter.com/WindowsUpdate/status/1460671383025815555 FINALLY.  So let me do the Susan translation for you: Today marks the time that I conside
[See the full post at: 21H2 is finally out]

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

3 users thanked author for this post.

lmacri, abbodi86, GreatAndPowerfulTech

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hi Susan. check out this recent blog about the 21H2 November 2021 update for Windows 10:
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2021/11/16/how-to-get-the-windows-10-november-2021-update/

especially this part:

Release cadence and support

We will transition to a new Windows 10 release cadence to align with the Windows 11 cadence, targeting annual feature update releases. We are now renaming the servicing option for releases to the General Availability Channel starting with the November 2021 Update (Note: this replaces the previous “Semi-Annual Channel” term for the servicing option). The next Windows 10 feature update is slated for the second half of 2022. We will continue to support at least one version of Windows 10 through Oct. 14, 2025. As a second half (H2) of the calendar year release, Home and Pro editions of the November 2021 Update will receive 18 months of servicing and support, and Enterprise and Education editions will receive 30 months of servicing and support beginning today.

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Great Lake Bunyip, AlexEiffel, lmacri, a

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AH HA – figured they would.

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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KB5007186 in WUmgr doesn’t seem to be right as it is the KB of November patch Tuesday CU and 21H2 is an Enablement Package.

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Created a full image backup this morning so installed now 21H2 on 21H1 Pro.
No problems so far.

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It came to me through patch KB5003791.
Fast and no problems, I’m already on 19044.1348

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21H2 is one of the few feature updates that has not caused any grief. I hope the new annual cadence keeps it that way. Fewer rushed releases is a good thing.

GreatAndPowerfulTech

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How do I get this? I’m on 21H1 currently. When I go to Windows Updates and check it is NOT offered. Why? I don’t think there are any safeguard holds on it for my computer (if there are though how would I check that so I could correct the problem)?

I know Microsoft has said this update is being managed so not available to everyone all at once. But Microsoft also said if you SEEK IT, as I have, it will be offered…but it is not.

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Mele20 wrote:

I know Microsoft has said this update is being managed so not available to everyone all at once. But Microsoft also said if you SEEK IT, as I have, it will be offered…but it is not.

I had it set by Group Policy to 21H1 although I thought I had changed it to 21H2 so it was only a few minutes ago that I actually checked the setting. DUH.

I now have 21H2.

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Coldheart9020

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Funny that they released 1-month old installation media (ISO, MCT, WSUS) for 21H2

while 21H1 (19043) got newer 1-week old installation media in WSUS

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Coldheart9020, AlexEiffel

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in GP I chg’d — 21H1 to 21H2 –, Chk for Updates, 21H2 showed and 0% for 25 seconds, 43%, 74%, 75%, Ready to Re-start. Really a quick process.

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I got 21H2 offered to me Tuesday evening and accepted the download and install (my HP-Omen Intel Core i7 7700HQ laptop is essentially my test machine, since my other laptop and two desktops are all Windows 7 x64 SP1 home or pro). The bits must have already been downloaded sometime earlier because almost nothing, maybe a couple MB’s, were downloaded; and the install took less time than a monthly cumulative update takes. Even the reboot took less time. Essentially, the only noticeable change was 19043 changed to 19044 and the version 1348 remained the same as after the November cumulative update, no other changes noticed. Everything working fine as before on 21H1 19043.1348.

 

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Susan Bradley wrote:

21H2 is finally out

Would not an acceptance of 21H2 be against the Defcon guidance at this time?

🍻

Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.

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Read the whole original post. This is an acknowledgement of the release. It is NOT a recommendation for installation. 21H1 has become Susan’s recommended version for the time being.

--Joe

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Coldheart9020, wavy

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Hi everyone,

It’s great to hear so many positive experiences of Windows 10 21H2. I can confirm the same.

I have more systems to upgrade but they are already using Windows 10 21H1 with the November 2021 updates installed so they should be fine too. I see little to no reason not to upgrade if your are already using 21H1 and everything is working fine for you.

Thanks and I wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving next week.

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Great Lake Bunyip, MegaThor

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I’m on 2004 Home (with Oct updates), and had squirreled away the 20H2 installation from off of MS site.
I’ve decided to skip that and go to 21H1 by getting the Media Creation Tool and ISO from MS, but as Susan has reported, it has already changed to 21H2.
I ended up downloading the 21H1 ISO from Heidoc site.

Questions:
1. Downloading from Heidoc only gets you the ISO, and then you need to go through the mounting, etc if you want to upgrade that way?
2. Or, can I reset the TRV (currently set to 2004) to 21H1, turn off the pause & metered connection and let Win Update do the upgrade to 21H1 therefore avoiding 21H2?

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The answer to both of your questions is “Yes.”
But the easiest way is to set TRV to 21H1 and let Windows Update do the work.

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Thanks! I’ll go the easy route (TRV) then, just happy I can avoid 21H2 for now!

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I guess we’re not considered ‘worthy’ yet in Perth, Western Australia because its now Thursday morning here and still no sign of 21H2 when I check Windows Update after I also checked several times during the day yesterday.

I do have the 21H2 ISO file downloaded and I suppose I could update my 2 PC’s with that but it seems to be a long, drawn out process compared with using Windows Update. I’ll probably wait a little longer.

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So Windows 10 finally switches to one-upgrade-per-year starting with 21H2?

I would say that this should have been done from 2017 (when 1703 was released and kickstarted the two-upgrade-per-year train). Two upgrades per year is simply too much.

Hope for the best. Prepare for the worst.

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There we go again:
Waiting for an update, that may or may not be withheld at Microsoft’s fickle whim and not knowing for how long.

Today marks the time that starts the-suspense-is-killing-me state of mind.

I’ll laugh once I stop crying.

1 Desktop Win 11
1 Laptop Win 10
Both tweaked to look, behave and feel like Windows 95
(except for the marine blue desktop, rgb(0, 3, 98)

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Carl D wrote:

still no sign of 21H2 when I check Windows Update after I also checked several times during the day yesterday.

Have you by any chance set TRV to 21H1 ?

I got 21H2 immediately as my TRV is set just to Windows 10 with no release version.

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E Pericoloso Sporgersi, Carl D

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Still no sign of 21H2 after checking Windows Update again so I went into gpedit and set the target version to 21H2 (it wasn’t configured for anything), rebooted and lo and behold – it appeared!

Took about a minute to download and install as opposed to about half an hour for the ISO file or the Upgrade Assistant which can be downloaded from MS (these methods also appear to ‘overwrite’ a large number of Windows files unnecessarily which is probably why they take so long – I did try this method yesterday but I wasn’t 100% happy with it so I restored a Macrium image before using the target release method).

This was for my Windows 10 Professional PC, of course.No problems so far, the only thing that seems to have changed is the Windows 10 version description (now Version 21H2 OS Build 19044.1348).

I’ll connect up the other PC with Windows 10 Home sometime in the next few days but if 21H2 hasn’t appeared by then I’ll have to use the Registry method to set the target release version to 21H2 since Home doesn’t have gpedit, of course.

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Connected up my second PC with Windows 10 Home yesterday and updated it to 21H2 – it still wasn’t offered by Windows Update so I had to use the Registry ‘trick’ to make it appear (I deleted the 2 required Registry keys after the update was done – same as I also deleted the extra entries in gpedit after updating my Windows 10 Professional machine a couple of days back.

And, I also updated my little Lenovo 11 inch laptop which has Windows 10 Home this morning (about 2 hours ago), had to use the Registry ‘trick’ with that as well to get 21H2.

You never know, Perth (and possibly the rest of Australia) may be offered the update (without having to jump through ‘hoops’) before Christmas.

Everything is running smoothly on all 3 machines so far.

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I finally got offered 21H2.

I use WuMgr. I was offered 21H2 and a defender update. Like a fool I tried to take both, The defender failed. Then I tried 21H2 and it failed. I rebooted and it said I had 21H2 (see pic 1). Right.

Not believing in Tinkerbelle, I booted to stand-alone Macrium and restored the first 5 partitions (image taken just before attempted update)(C plus boot stuff plus added boot stuff), booted to Linux just to be sure it was still okay (since that’s all I really care about), booted to windows, and this time just updated 21H2, and it seemed to take fine. Reboot, but I can’t see any difference(pic2). Guess it’s all under the hood.

Boring.

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Look at winver.

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My post above shows that but I just didn’t believe it, so to be absolutely sure, I restored and applied again. Second time all went well, but, then, again, I didn’t try to update the defender update at the same time. I have experienced that prob before – caveat: don’t update a defender update when updating anything else – do it separately. 🙂

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E Pericoloso Sporgersi wrote:

Today marks the time that starts the-suspense-is-killing-me state of mind.

Check for updates using WUmgr.

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Uh, folks, they really are staging this out – took me a couple days to get it where some got it immediately and some still haven’t. Patience!

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My NAS got the push last night.  It was waiting for me to install this morning, which I did.

No hiccups.

Always create a fresh drive image before making system changes/Windows updates; you may need to start over!

We all have our own reasons for doing the things that we do with our systems; we don't need anyone's approval, and we don't all have to do the same things.

We were all once "Average Users".

Computer Specs

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Reporting in: downloaded the 21H2 iso, clean installed offline on 17th Nov full-metal and no issues other than an OOBE (yellow) error popup which flashed up briefly and disappeared during setup. Post setup checks showed no errors or violations which was then followed by personal device mitigations via GPE, services, task sched, registry edits etc.. now sitting with circa another year before the next feature upgrade, nice!

Upgrading from 21H1 is only a small enablement package (slick on another PC)

My advice, take the crud out of FUD.

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Alex5723 wrote:

I got 21H2 immediately as my TRV is set just to Windows 10 with no release version.

May 2021 Microsoft left me dangling, they didn’t tell me when and *if* I would get Windows 10 version 21H1. My patience ran out and I forced the issue with the Media Creation Tool.

Now Microsoft AGAIN tries to leave me dangling. The gall leaving my computer pregnant with the necessary update files and then keeping them dormant. NO, no more!

This time I used the registry hack -Windows1021H2.reg- to force the update activation. Worked like a charm.

What with with a max of 77 days pause and the version hack that I’ll try to remember, this might be handy in the future. Certainly up to 2025 …

1 Desktop Win 11
1 Laptop Win 10
Both tweaked to look, behave and feel like Windows 95
(except for the marine blue desktop, rgb(0, 3, 98)

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Alex5723

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The B side of my dual boot wasn’t ready.  I had to stitch it back together into a Microsoft-supported Windows 10.  Got that completed yesterday, moving the Users system folder back to the System drive, then used the Location tabs in the subfolders to move all the content back to my own Users folder.  Got the push to 21H2 this morning.

It took ‘default browser’ away from Firefox, but didn’t give it to Edge; I don’t have a default browser set at the moment.  It also removed nearly all my browser extensions from Firefox, but I’ve got all of them reinstalled.

Other than that, I haven’t noticed any other hiccups.

Always create a fresh drive image before making system changes/Windows updates; you may need to start over!

We all have our own reasons for doing the things that we do with our systems; we don't need anyone's approval, and we don't all have to do the same things.

We were all once "Average Users".

Computer Specs

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I’ve had an interesting couple of days. In order to update my Windows 10 21H1 to 21H2, I had to put it all back together; put the Users folder back on the system drive and stir around in the registry quite a bit. Then sometime this past weekend, my Weather App and News App and MyRadar all stopped working. I had them pinned to the taskbar, and when I clicked on one, it would just disappear from the taskbar and not open.

I tried every suggested fix I could find on the internet to no avail. The last trick I tried was to enable my default Administrator account, sign on there, and see what I could do from that vantage point. To my surprise, all the apps worked. I went through some of the fixes to see if they would carry over to my other user accounts, but no joy. My other admin account and my two standard user accounts had no apps. That meant only one thing. I had managed to pooch my user profiles.

I copied all data from all the profiles to another drive in my PC, then deleted and recreated my pooched accounts. Once the recreated accounts were up and running, all the apps are working again. From within my new Administrators group account, I again disabled the default Administrator account for another rainy day.

None of this was 21H2, it was due to my own shenanigans.  It’s all good now, even Firefox is once again my default browser.

Always create a fresh drive image before making system changes/Windows updates; you may need to start over!

We all have our own reasons for doing the things that we do with our systems; we don't need anyone's approval, and we don't all have to do the same things.

We were all once "Average Users".

Computer Specs

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Fred

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Still no GAC in GP on 21H2 win10 pro ver 19044.1348, SAC still there.
oh Ghack!

If debian is good enough for NASA...

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abbodi86

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Yeah. See #2402145 as reported on 11/17. 🙂

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I think MS will add or change the GP options from SAC to GAC via the monthly quality updates sometime in the near future, as they did recently with allowing us to specify whether to stay on Windows 10 or migrate to Windows 11.

For that “option” they added the box to enter the OS version (Windows 10 or Windows 11) to the already existing setting to select the target version (21H1, 21H2, etc.) for Feature Updates in Group Policy.

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