Got a misbehaving Windows 10?

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If you ever have a misbehaving Windows 10 that just will not install and update no matter what dism or sfc or powershell command or anything that you’
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Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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lmacri, Mug Wump, Vincenzo, CyGuy

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Susan Bradley wrote:

You will not lose data. (that said, I would still recommend to back up your computer)

If one has the means, the wherewithal to make a back up before “doing an inplace repair over the top”, that same means can be put to use to make a back up (I prefer drive imaging) before making system changes/Windows updates.

This very afternoon I was using Autoruns on the B side of this dual boot to do some registry pruning, and pooched it.  On a reboot to check my work, I got the “Oops” blue screen and the attempted auto repair.  When that finished, I rebooted to the A side, restored my latest B side OS drive image (counting the reboot to the A side, it took 2:37 for the restore), then booted back into a fully functioning OS on the B side.

I again launched Autoruns and continued my pruning, made a fresh drive image before I reached what I had determined to be the spot where I pooched it (image and validation was less than 3 minutes), then at that critical spot I pruned a single value from a MULTI_Z rather than deleting the Key, finished the rest of my pruning, rebooted to check my work, and it was all good.

Restoring a known-good drive image is a great deal faster and less fraught than doing an inplace upgrade over the top.  This is why I recommend Hardened Windows.

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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RetiredGeek, CyGuy, HiFlyer

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But a restore may not fix a root cause/underlying patching issue.  You may roll back to a similar state.  A repair over the top repairs the underlying “plumbing”.  Often I want to go forward, not roll back.

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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rontpxz81, CyGuy, mulletback, HiFlyer

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Susan Bradley wrote:

But a restore may not fix a root cause/underlying patching issue. You may roll back to a similar state.

bbearren wrote:

Restoring a known-good drive image is a great deal faster and less fraught than doing an inplace upgrade over the top. This is why I recommend Hardened Windows.

A known-good drive image does not contain any root cause/underlying patching issue.  That’s why it’s called known-good.  It takes me back to where I was before any problem cropped up.

In my case, as mentioned in my first reply, 99.9% of the time, I am the cause of Windows problems.  For me, having drive images that are a week old or less allows me the freedom to delve into Windows inner workings with confidence.

I had one occasion when there was an unknown underlying issue that had not made itself evident (and I had been a bit lax in my Windows health checkup regimen), and I had to go back a couple of months to get to a known-good image.  But since I follow my own advice in Hardened Windows, “I have one month (four sets) of drive images on the internal drive in my desktop, two months of drive images on my NAS, and three months of drive images on my external HDD’s”, and it takes little time to restore an image.

bbearren wrote:

The longer I play with this stuff the more convinced I am that nothing really beats a good drive image, and making sure that you do indeed have a good drive image is something to keep in mind. Also having fresh duplicates of your data scattered around makes restoring a good drive image a fairly simple and convenient task.

About once a month I run dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth and then sfc /scannow.  Every-so-often, something will be found and repaired, even though I’ve not noticed any issues with my systems.  But it lets me know that my drive images will be known-good.

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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rontpxz81

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I have found, after using Windows 10 Home for three years, that nearly all of the update problems are related to the rapid boot feature. Apparently the “version” of the operating system running in the current memory (which includes the most recent boot “version” since that is just a copy of the last-run “version” in memory prior to turning the system off) develops slight variations from the operating system permanently residing on the “C” drive or boot drive, which have to be resolved by running DISM and SFC commands. Over a year ago I decided to do away with these potentially recurring problems by permanently disabling rapid boot. I opened an administrator command prompt and typed “powercfg -h off” without the double quotes, which not only disables hibernation but also removes rapid boot as even an option, as well as frees up gigabytes of SSD disk space. My seventh generation Intel Core i7 laptop with 8 GB RAM boots plenty fast enough from the 128 GB SSD drive to not have to worry about problems resulting from rapid boot. And ever since permanently disabling rapid boot and hibernation I never ever have any problems with any updates  anymore.

 

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rontpxz81, RockE, Mr. Austin, RetiredGeek, mledman, CyGuy, bbearren

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bbearren wrote:

A known-good drive image does not contain any root cause/underlying patching issue

Many are not as disciplined as you and have old backups. They has since added / updated things and don’t want to have to re-do what may be hours of work.
In this scenario, a repair install gets them to a place where they can get back to work quickly – and make a new backup.

cheers, Paul

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Paul T wrote:

Many are not as disciplined as you and have old backups.

I’m rather lazy, myself, not well-disciplined at all.  But Task Scheduler is available to everyone running Windows 10, and Task Scheduler takes care of virtually all of my routine maintenance, including weekly drive imaging.  So I can still be lazy and undisciplined, and yet get things done that need to be done.

Restoring a known-good drive image is exponentially faster than a repair/re-install.

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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RockE

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After updates broke for me for the past year and half since v1909 and multiple attempts to update over many many hours following Google search solutions, this worked for me today and I am enormously grateful, at least until Win11 rejects my Surface Pro 7.

Thank you, thank you!

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