Use Caution with the April Patch Tuesday Cumulative Update!

I have never ever had a problem with a patch Tuesday update, at least not to the point where my system could no longer boot. Every month I seem to read about some people who have major problems with an update, but it always seems to be some obscure issue that affects only a relatively small number of people.

Today was my turn.

The funny thing is that every month, I typically wait a few days before allowing the patch to be applied to my systems just to see if I hear anything about any issues. This month, as always, I temporarily turned off Windows update, but I accidentally forgot to do this on my primary laptop. As a result, the updates got applied to my laptop, but it resulted in bluescreen failure on startup with the failure being reported in TCPIP.SYS.

Windows first tried to perform an automatic recovery but failed. I tried a lot of additional things:

Safe Mode - failed
Safe Mode with Command Prompt - failed
Recovery point - there was a recovery point from before the updates were installed, but this too failed.

I finally got to a point where I had to try a "Reset this PC" option, and I was rather surprised at how well this worked.

Reset this PC now gives you the option to pull Windows files down from the cloud or to simply use your local files. I thought I'd just try the local files and that worked.

When it was done, I was caught a little bit by surprise because it immediately logged me in using Windows Hello facial recognition. I hadn't realized that this data would be maintained. Every single one of my desktop items and personal documents and files were there. I'm having to reinstall my programs, but that's really not that big a deal.

Just to tempt fate, and because I'm that person who's going to push the button after me someone tells me not to, I installed the April patch again. This time it installed without any difficulties. Go figure.

For anyone interested, my C: drive with Windows on it is BitLocker encrypted. I had to enter my recovery key each time I booted the system when trying various tasks such as safe mode, etc. but after the final Reset This PC operation, BitLocker remained enabled so none of data was ever unencrypted even with the whole recovery process.

While I certainly wasn't thrilled about the initial problem, I was pretty impressed with how Windows was able to recover from this situation. It was my first time ever going through that process.

I'm absolutely great at doing backups so my total loss would have been only about one hour of work, but this was still a worthwhile experience to go through just to experience how it all worked.

The update worked for many people but sometimes glitches do happen. I always take a Macrium image of my system drive before doing any updates

@hsehestedt sounds a bit of a nightmare, glad your back running ok, did you have an image from Macrium or similar you could have used?

I'm not as diligent as you with making backups. I'm a once a week gal, and for that exact reason my data is separate from my OS. Although recovery IS getting better, it's still not always perfect and because of so many different variables probably never will be. For many, an experience like yours would make them see the light when it comes to backing up. For others, they will never learn.

glasskuter said:

I'm not as diligent as you with making backups. I'm a once a week gal, and for that exact reason my data is separate from my OS. Although recovery IS getting better, it's still not always perfect and because of so many different variables probably never will be. For many, an experience like yours would make them see the light when it comes to backing up. For others, they will never learn.

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Same here, once a week but more often if updating or installing new software etc.

hsehestedt said:

Safe Mode - failed
Safe Mode with Command Prompt - failed
Recovery point - there was a recovery point from before the updates were installed, but this too failed.

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This is the reason I gave up on Windows recovery a long time ago. 3rd party backups all the way, restore within 2 mins.

The-Hive said:

@hsehestedt sounds a bit of a nightmare, glad your back running ok, did you have an image from Macrium or similar you could have used?

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Yes, I do have Macrium backups. But I use a couple of different schemes on the laptop. I use FreeFileSync to sync all my personal documents and files over to my desktop system and to another data server in a near real-time manner. As a result, I only do Macrium backups on the laptop about once a week. But the desktop gets backed up every single day.

Still, I viewed it as a good exercise to playing with some of the recovery tools .

I'm sure that I was simply an outlier and that most people won't have a problem with the updates. Heck, when I applied the same patch again after my recovery it installed just fine. So I have no idea what actually went wrong.

hsehestedt said:

I have no idea what actually went wrong

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When I used to teach classes, I called this "windows boogers." Give me an explainable problem any day and I'll run with it, but those boogers are what drives me bonkers.

hsehestedt said:

I'm sure that I was simply an outlier and that most people won't have a problem with the updates. Heck, when I applied the same patch again after my recovery it installed just fine. So I have no idea what actually went wrong.

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Yes, you were just unlucky. So far I haven't had issues with any W11 updates. I updated 3 W11 machines yesterday, all went just fine.

hsehestedt said:

Yes, I do have Macrium backups. But I use a couple of different schemes on the laptop. I use FreeFileSync to sync all my personal documents and files over to my desktop system and to another data server in a near real-time manner. As a result, I only do Macrium backups on the laptop about once a week. But the desktop gets backed up every single day.

Still, I viewed it as a good exercise to playing with some of the recovery tools :).

I'm sure that I was simply an outlier and that most people won't have a problem with the updates. Heck, when I applied the same patch again after my recovery it installed just fine. So I have no idea what actually went wrong.

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Great, at least you know you can recovery, and you can afford to try things and if they don't work you know you will be ok