Windows 10 will automatically remove updates, drivers that break booting

Enlarge / Genuinely the worst.

Windows appears to be getting a little smarter about updates that go wrong. A newly published support page (spotted by Windows Latest) describes what the operating system does when a recent update causes a boot failure. First, Windows will uninstall the update and revert to a configuration that should work correctly. It will then block the update for 30 days.

The page states that this approach will be taken for both driver updates and the regular monthly Patch Tuesday updates. It's not unusual for Microsoft to have to issue blocks for these updates to prevent them from being distributed to certain system configurations after problems are found. But this policy allows for more fine-grained blocking, wherein systems will impose a temporary block on themselves should they have to. In most cases, when problems with updates are discovered, they're fixed and the updates are re-issued within a few days or weeks. So a 30-day block should typically give enough time for the update to be fixed prior to the attempted reinstallation.

It's not clear if this approach will be used for the twice-yearly feature upgrades or just the regular monthly Patch Tuesday updates. Microsoft's terminology usually distinguishes between "updates" (which are the things released on Patch Tuesdays) and "upgrades" (which come out twice a year). The description only mentions updates and driver updates. The install mechanism used by upgrades is completely separate from that used by updates, with its own separate rollback logic, so we'd suspect that nothing has changed for those.

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