Windows 10 Anniversary Update woes

There’s a major update for Win 10 out. You may have read about it. I hadn’t been paying attention, but I sure am now.

I have a Lenovo X1 Carbon running Win 10 Pro. It’s about a year old. I had the Windows Update set to update automatically. Big mistake, as you’ll see.

Today, as I turned the computer on to use during lunch, it started to perform an upgrade. That won’t take long, I thought. I was wrong. The machine reboooted several times and the whole operation took about 15 minutes. When I finally got the logon screen back, I couldn’t log onto the domain. I got this message:

“The security database on the server does not have a computer account for this workstation trust relationship.”

I couldn’t log on to a local account, either. I got a message saying that the user name and password were wrong.

I did a little web research. Microsoft is admitting that this is sometimes a problem, and their  recommended solution is to boot the computer with Win 10 installation media, and select repair.

I downloaded the Windows 10 bootable media creator, and made a bootable 4 GB USB stick. I stuck it into the computer, and restarted. It booted into the same screen, obviously booting from the builtin SSD and ignoring the USB stick. After several attempts, I finally got into the BIOS, and noted that. while there’s no option to have it boot from the USB port, if you press F12 at the right moment, you can get into the boot manager, from where you can sometimes (most of the time the UBS drive isn’t listed as an option, but sometimes it says select USB media. That’s what I did.

When I finally got the computer booted off the Win 10 installation image, I didn’t see a menu. Instead, I get a window that said: “It looks like you started an upgrade and booted from the installation media. If you want to continue with the upgrade, remove the media from your PC, and click Yes. If you want to perform a clean installation instead, click No.”

Well, that was revolting. Two choices, and neither of them what I wanted. I tried saying Yes to see if there were any choices down the line, but there weren’t. I took the media out and clicked Yes, and the computer booted from the SSD into the same logon screen that led nowhere.

I went back to the screen with the two bad choices and told it to do a clean install, hoping there would be a chance to rescind that decision down the line. Turns out that there is. You get a screen with a big Install Now and a little tiny Repair label down in the lower left corner. Breathing a sigh of relief, I clicked on it.

On the next screen, I clicked on Troubleshoot. On the Next screen, I picked Command Prompt. That is supposed to activat the hidden admin account. I them booted Win 10 off the SSD and attempted to sign in as the Administrator. I got the message: Your account has been disabled, Please contact your system administrator. 

I went back to the Troubleshooting menu, and picked Go back to the previous build.

When the computer had returned to the previous configuration, I went into Windows Update Settings, clicked on Advanced Options, and set the checkbox next to Defer Updates to selected. That supposedly gives Microsoft more time to fix bugs before they apply updates, trading stability for features, which I think is a good trade-off. I didn’t know about this option before, but now I’m setting it on all my Windows 10 machines. While I was at it, I changed the How updates are applied to Notify to schedule restart.

I’m hoping by the time that Microsoft tries to update this computer again that they’ve fixed this bug. Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be the fine-grained control of updates that we have in Win 7.

Grrr…