Windows 10 Home, version 1511, 10586 update not installing

So over the past few years, I have not been updating this one simply because I started playing games on my computer. While Linux support is getting better, realistically you can’t expect things to just work.

Anyway, I recently had to replace my motherboard, and as such I had to reinstall Windows 10. A funny thing, after I replaced my board with the same hardware (HDD as well), it actually booted in to Windows 10 without any changes on my part. Anyway, this all went well, and I got Windows installed, and configured and so on. The problems started when I was running through the updates, until I got to Windows 10 Home, version 1511, 10586. This was ready to install, just required a reboot, but no matter how many times I rebooted, it would not start installing.

After a while this got ridiculous. Since Microsoft have gone with the Chrome way of updating, you are not allowed to choose what updates to install and when to install them. Windows will automatically check for updates, download them and at best you are allowed to schedule a reboot. Here my problems came, because it seems after a while Windows becomes really aggressive in getting things installed, and since this update never really installed it tried to reboot every 6 – 10 hours or so. Best part, I was not allowed to reschedule the update. Anyway, I managed to solve it, somehow. There are some relevant posts out there, like this from Microsoft Answers, and this from TenForums. From the command list, the one on TenForums seemed to give me the most, as the sfc fixed some errors that were fixed. I am not sure if they were related though.

In the end, I figured the download was corrupted. In these days, it should be relatively easy to fix that, I mean torrents are relatively well known technology at this time. Cleaning the update cache though, is not really that simple as a single button click. I found this guide from The Windows Club (at this stage I am just showing off my Google fu). Simply put, you need to input some commands. So press your Windows key and type

cmd

Right click the Command Prompt and select Run as administrator. You should have a window that looks something like this:

Command Prompt with administrator privilege

I marked in yellow what you need to look for, as this indicates it is running as Administrator. Now you need to stop the update services:

net stop wuauserv
net stop bits

Note, if you copy and paste the commands, remember you need to run one line at a time, if you try both, it will fail. Now you can delete the update cache. So press Windows key + R to get the run dialog and copy paste this:

%windir%\SoftwareDistribution

This should open a folder that looks something like this 

Now, just mark everything, and delete it (you can use Ctrl + A and then press Del). Almost finished now, just need to restart the update services. So go back to the command prompt (remember to run as administrator if you closed it) and copy paste this two commands:

net start wuauserv
net start bits

Note, if you copy paste the commands I give you, you need to run them one at a time. At this stage, you can run Windows Update again, it will redownload all the files and will try again for the update. For me, the update stuck at 32% at preparing to install. I just rebooted my computer, after it had worked on this over night. This seemed to work and it installed successfully. However, to me this seems to indicate that as of yet Microsoft doesn’t really know how to push these larger updates to your computer, hopefully the next major update to Windows 10 will run allot smoother than this one.