What If You Turn Off Your PC During An Update?

warning don't turn off your computer during this update as often as you've seen this message you've probably wondered well what exactly would happen if i turned off the computer or worse yet lost power during an update and what if windows update gets stuck and just never completes is it safe to restart the pc or are you doomed to have something go wrong so here's the deal back when windows vista first came out microsoft was trying to find a way to make the update process a little more robust with more and more people getting updates delivered over the internet so they introduced a mechanism called component based servicing cbs then no not that one does a couple of things differently to ensure that updates are installed correctly first it checks to make sure that all required files are present before starting installation and this is perhaps more relevant for what we're discussing today it marks an update as complete after it's installed cbs is part of the underlying architecture of windows update so if there's a power loss or you just unplug your computer during an update as part of some kind of masochistic experiment it'll kick back in once you boot back into windows and see that an update wasn't marked as complete now i won't know why the update wasn't completed but it also doesn't have to instead cbs just rolls back whatever changes the updater made and restores whatever the previous state was before you started the install allowing you to try again later without damaging anything on your pc so those please do not turn off your computer messages don't always mean that you're at risk of an imminent catastrophe if you don't follow the instructions with a caveat cbs obviously requires critical files that help run windows itself in order for it to operate so while cbs might work perfectly if a shutdown occurs while windows is updating the gui or installing some non-critical feature you still might be in for a world of trouble if the power loss happens while core windows components are being updated and unfortunately you've got no way of knowing when that's happening because windows doesn't tell you the result can be anything from certain aspects of windows not functioning correctly to windows refusing to boot at all instead giving you a blue screen of death or simply a blank display when you try to start up the system uh-oh but if this happens try not to panic even the most disastrous failed updates shouldn't touch the personal data on the drive so if your pc won't boot into windows you can use a windows installation usb drive that you can easily create on another system and boot into that under troubleshoot then you can use startup repair to fix the damaged windows files that are giving you the issue then if that doesn't work for some reason you can always open up command prompt from that same usb type notepad.exe to open notepad then use the open command in notepad to bring up a file explorer window that will allow you to copy any files you need to another storage device or this is the much easier way you can just remove the drive from your computer entirely connect it as a secondary drive to a different pc and copy all your files that way but okay what if you feel like you have to restart during the update process because windows update is simply not moving and is stuck at a certain percentage for a very long time like even for hours this can happen for any number of reasons but if it's been stuck for an excessive period and it looks like your drive isn't busy anymore like the leds not blinkity blinking it probably won't hurt anything to restart the system and take another crack at it once it comes up you can use a troubleshooter that's built into windows to clear the windows update cache which can often fix problems with windows update just type troubleshoot windows update into the windows 10 search bar to find it so bottom line then try not to panic if your update gets interrupted far worse things could happen to your data like having linus handle it apparently this script was not written assuming that i would host it but i did john i saw that and i also saw our sponsor thanks to storyblocks for sponsoring today's video storyblocks helps you bring your stories to life without sacrifice due to time budget or lack of other resources although usually it comes down to time and budget doesn't it they feature over 1 million different stock assets for you to use and you can save a ton of time using their in-browser video editor they've got pre-designed templates animations and outros and storyblocks uses an affordable subscription model with their unlimited all-access plan giving you unlimited video and audio downloads instead of a costly pay-per-clip model we use it here on techwiki all the time because we don't always have the time or budget remember that to go out and shoot the perfect b-roll footage so check out story blocks today at storyblocks.com techquickie thanks for watching guys like dislike 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Channel: Techquickie

Views: 3,753,163

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Id: L8tdPYqFV7E

Length: 5min 1sec (301 seconds)

Published: Tue May 04 2021