Windows 7 Updates failed to configure...

Anyone have this sort of thing happen before? I shut down my computer about an hour ago and it installed 6 updates. Upon restarting, it sat at 0% configuration for five minutes. I hard rebooted, and it did it again upon the second restart. The third time around I started in Safe Mode and it flashed a message for less than a second about updates failing to configure, and now Windows Update shows four failed updates.

A - What a pain in the - I lost ten minutes of productive time to this bunk, and another five doing a quick search and posting this...

B - Does anyone know if this might be an issue with the specific updates? They're listed below, if it helps.

 

Installed these no problems on my machine yesterday.

Try installing them again, and leave it longer than 5 minutes maybe 10 or so. I've had it in the past where it's hung for a long time, but in the end it has completed. Hard booting when it's configuring updates can be dangerous also, can load to a whole host of issues.

If this fails, try downloading the updates from Microsoft manually, and install them, this might then solve your issues.

 

Thanks for the quick reply. I'll probably retry tonight. I wouldn't have posted anything at all except that it was a massive pain to have it happen when it did - I'm out of the house with nothing but my computer (i.e. nothing to read, nothing to write on, nothing to do but wait for my computer to boot up), and I have a bunch of work to get done, so I didn't have the patience to let a small handful of routine updates suck up too much of my time. If it had been registering some progress, it would have been one thing, but since it was registering 0% I couldn't deal with it.

Incidentally, did it register as failed because it restarted twice during the configuration attempts, or because I was booting into safe mode, or for some other reason?

 

Same thing happened to me on my Acer laptop running win7 x64 the exact same 4 updates failed and now I am locked in a perpetual cycle at every reboot with the machine trying to install these and failing every time. Each restart it does it twice upon failing b4 reverting to the way it was before. I have no clue what to do. I tried downloading them manually and doing it....same issues.

 

Thanks for the info - good to know it's not just me. Now hopefully someone will be able to share a little insight on what we can do to fix this.

Incidentally, Microsoft used to have some sort of forums that you could access with your Live ID where people could discuss issues like this, but I can't seem to find any sort of peer-to-peer support there anymore. Anybody know where that can be found these days, if it can be found at all?

 

Same thing happened to me last night. Waited for 10 minutes the first time and then hard rebooted. Got to configuring updates again and after 5 minutes or so Windows reverted to previous state before updates.
A look at the Event Viewer shows that one update apparently caused the problem for me.

Installation Failure: Windows failed to install the following update with error 0x800705b4: Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB982018).

MS says:
An update that improves the compatibility of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 with Advanced Format Disks is available

I am going to try and disable this update and see if it works.

 

Apparently I didn't even have to disable the problematic KB982018 update. It installed successfully after I manually ran Windows Update. Event Viewer doesn't show any other update errors.

Try manually running Windows Update and select one at a time to see if any of them will install on their own.

 

You might want to think again about disabling the update to ESENT services, kb982018. It appears as though it touches just about every mass storage driver in the OS.

 

I have the SAME problem here, just now!! What the hell???
I had to go into safe mode, and after that, finally windows started again..I will try to update windows manually now..

 

Ok, it works I solved my issue. I had to install manually one by one all the updates and restart when every single update asked me to.
Everything now is running fine.

 

For the ones who are worried and hesitant installing the Windows Updates should manually install each of the 4 listed above. However, I have installed all the updates with no issues.

 

I had the same issue on my X120e today. I am currently manually installing the updates, and we'll see what happens.

EDIT: And, manually installing the updates seems to have done the trick! Updates configured in under 15 seconds.

 

It's quite strange that many people had the same issue, I wonder what could it be?

 

It was technet I was thinking of earlier:

Windows Update keeps failing to install 4 recommended KB;s

Looks like there are a lot of others coming up with the same issue, and their solution has been pretty much the same as we've come up with here...

 

Hi there!

Same problem here. The solution of installing updates one after the other worked for me.

Thanks a lot !

 

I didn't do anything about it the last couple days, then Windows auto-updated this morning while I was in the shower and configured with no problems. Looks like MS got the issue figured out.