Windows 10 April 2018 upgrade woes - anyone any ideas?

[Carol Haynes]

Hi all

I have a customers Lenovo All in One and I am stumped.

It went through the April 10 upgrade and subsequent windows updates and ended up freezing on the Lenovo screen.

I have a windows 10 build 1083 USB drive and an earlier version on DVD - plus a recovery DVD. None of them will boot (I have disabled secure boot and set stuff back to legacy but still no joy).

I removed the hard disk and recovered her data and with her permission removed all partitions, plugged it in and then it booted from the USB drive and I installed a fresh copy of windows.

I heaved a sigh of relief and started updating. Cumpulative update for Windows 1803 (KB4100403)  said it need to restart to complete which I did and instantly it was back to square one.

System won't boot (shows Lenovo screen) - can't even boot the memtest CD.

Reseated RAM with hard disk out and ran mem test - no problems but as soon as the hard disk is present no joy.

I can only assume that KB4100403 is doing something to the hard disk that completely screws up the boot process.

Short of wiping the hard disk, starting again and disabling windows update I have no idea how to proceed?

Anyone got any ideas?

[cranioscopical]

Don't think this will help you but...

My way out of this mess was to install a backup of my boot drive from PE, forbid updates, wipe out all of Winupdates info/history/structure, then wait and install a later update manually.

I don't dare let the damned update near any other of my machines. It took me about 2 working days to sort it out on this one.

[Shades]

On the TomsHardware site there is a similar thread created that describes the problem of OP almost verbatim. In one of the posts from that thread was a suggestion to leave it on and wait. That person mentioned that after 20 minutes of watching the boot screen, it suddenly continued and booted into Windows. 

In the Lenovo forum a post from 2017 describes all the steps the person took so his system would boot again after experiencing a very similar problem. Scroll to the middle of the page to see the steps. It involves recreating the boot section on the hard disk, which appears to be a good strategy for the solution to the problem of the OP.

More research revealed that it is likely LSE (Lenovo Service Engine) is the culprit. It is part of the boot procedure, has a security vulnerability and Microsoft patched this recently. There is a way to get rid of LSE, see this link.

[IainB]

@Shades: ^^ Thanks. Could be very useful. I had been having similar probs. I shall do some reading up of the links you give.

[Carol Haynes]

Thanks all - I actually solved the problem by swapping out a WD Blue HD and replacing it with another drive.

Having installed and updated Windows 4 times on the old drive I suspected something was odd about the computer ()the person who brought it to me works in an office with 2 ideantical models - both of which updated without issue).

The old drive appears to pass CHKDSK completely without errors but when I ran it again if found bitmap issues so I suspect the drive is not working properly.

Haviong said that I have had a slew of updates that failed dropped off - mostly bricking the copmputers!!

When is there going to be a class action suit and a sensible approach to control on updates again? Damn annoying.

[Carol Haynes]

Thanks @shades - that is worth bookmarking!!!

Don't you just hate it when manufacturer's insist on installing unneccessary crap!!!

[wraith808]

Microsoft pretty much ruined their OS that broke the mold of even numbered releases being terrible with a few bad decisions.  This insistence that you have to get all of their updates, and making it hard to make a decision for your computer was one of them.  Even the vaunted delay and schedule doesn't work- on the 21st of May, it prompted me.  I said delay until the 26th as I've pretty much given up trying to get around it, but was in the middle of some research for a writing project, and couldn't be interrupted, and then had the rest of the week to contend with.  I was done with my research for the night, so went to bed.  The next morning?  My machine had rebooted and the update was installed.

And yes, to forestall the old you can try another OS argument, I've tried other OSes, and they all leave something to be desired- they just have their cons in different places in my experience.

[Carol Haynes]

And yes, to forestall the old you can try another OS argument, I've tried other OSes, and they all leave something to be desired- they just have their cons in different places in my experience.

You can try this - had mixed results: Windows Update Hide/Show http://download.microsoft.com/download/f/2/2/f22d5fdb-59cd-4275-8c95-1be17bf70b21/wushowhide.diagcab - basically gives you a hide option for updates like in Windows 7.

Personally I have simply disabled the Windows update service on my system and run it when I am ready to do updates. The other alternative is just mark your network as metered and then it won't do updates unless you turn metered off.

[wraith808]

We really need a thumbs up type of thing, so you can thank someone without having to write a needless post

I say all that to say... thanks!  Useful information! 

[Carol Haynes]

[4wd]

Windows Update MiniTool still works, you can use it to choose, (un)hide, and install updates.



Install via Chocolatey or download from a software repo, eg. MajorGeeks

[wraith808]

Windows Update MiniTool still works, you can use it to choose, (un)hide, and install updates.

[attachment 1 not found]

Install via Chocolatey or download from a software repo, eg. MajorGeeks

Does that solve the problem of the OS randomly installing updates?  Or is this just an alternative to using Windows Update?

[Carol Haynes]

Does that solve the problem of the OS randomly installing updates?  Or is this just an alternative to using Windows Update?

Seems to be a long thread about it here ion Windows 10 - doesn't seem to be a panacea: https://www.tenforums.com/drivers-hardware/33521-windows-update-minitool.html

[wraith808]

Hmmm...

You have no option to prevent WU from installing updates in the Home version.

That's indeed what I've found in practice.  I've been able to fight with it to delay for a while (sometimes a long while), but in the end, it always wins.  I could disable it, but that has never been tenable to me.

[Carol Haynes]

The show/hide utility from MS should allow you to delay installations indefinitely but you have to spot them before they ionstall them. The only way I can see it working is to disable the WU service - then regualrly enable it, run show hide, install what you want and then disable it again.

[4wd]

You have no option to prevent WU from installing updates in the Home version.

That's indeed what I've found in practice.  I've been able to fight with it to delay for a while (sometimes a long while), but in the end, it always wins.  I could disable it, but that has never been tenable to me.

Yep, always been the case with W10Home, it's why I avoid it.

Seems to be a long thread about it here ion Windows 10 - doesn't seem to be a panacea: https://www.tenforums.com/drivers-hardware/33521-windows-update-minitool.html

All except the last page and a half pertain to previous versions that required another piece of software to run, (as mentioned by IainB back here), the last version (2016-12-20) is basically standalone.

It's too bad wsoffline won't let you pick and choose what updates to install since you could leave the update service permanently disabled then.

Re. OP problem with the drive, I have one computer here that uses a Seagate 2.5" 500GB HDD, it has to run with the HDDs set to not spin down because the Seagate will lock up the machine when it tries to spin up after sleep, hibernate, etc.  Works absolutely fine from power on and it's been like that since it was installed as a new HDD on Windows 8.1.
Very strange considering it's basically a laptop HDD and designed for that ... must be a BIOS thing but unfortunately it's an old board so no new updates.