October’s Patch Tuesday rollout includes a host of important fixes – addressing 62 security issues to include a zero-day vulnerability – but a glitch in the patch publishing process is causing headaches for admins of enterprise networks.
Microsoft user forums lit up today with reports of problems with the Windows 10 update, which if installed overnight rendered many machines unable to boot and resulted in a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD).
Some users complained of maxed out disc usage, while others said the update gets stuck during installation.
“I deploy patches via (System Center Configuration Manager) on a regular basis to nearly 5500 clients worldwide,” wrote one poster to the official Microsoft community forum. “My first group of Alpha systems which contains all of my own workstations receive the first round of patches as a test.
“ALL of the systems running 1703 blue screen upon reboot AFTER applying this patch (KB4041676).”
“The message that comes up is INACCESSIBLE BOOT DEVICE,” the post went on. “After that, it reboots automatically, attempts to boot again, and then displays the ‘Automatic Repair’ screen. None of these systems make it past this message.”
Several users tried system restore to get some of their machines back online, with varying degrees of success.
“So far NOTHING has brought the computers back,” wrote another poster. “These are varying models as well across laptops and desktops, the main contributing factors are Windows 10 1703 and the KB 4041676 update.”
“Some computers which have System Restore HAVE then come back and been OK but it would seem that (our) main bulk of computers have a policy applied which turns off system restore so we have 150+ computers that we cannot do anything with currently,” that post continued. “Our only option (at the moment) is to rebuild.”
By day’s end, several Microsoft community volunteers had isolated the problem to enterprise environments using the Windows Server Update Services program.
Patches downloaded using the normal Windows update did not cause the problem.
“Bottom line Microsoft accidentally pushed the Delta updates to the WSUS channel,” wrote Susan Bradley, a community moderator. “If you happen to have caught both, this will BSOD a machine.”
“This is NOT as a result of the patch - it is a result of having TWO updates being pushed to the machine at the same time,” that post went on. “The Delta patch should not have been placed on WSUS channel and was expired last night.”
