Undoing the Last Installed Windows Updates via Command Line

Question

Using the command line, how can I undo the last installed windows updates?

Solution 1

Windows Updates should create a System Restore Point before installing the update, so you should be able to roll back to that.

How to restore Windows XP to a previous state describes the steps to rollback to a restore point and although is obviously Windows XP specific, the process should be similar for Server 2003.

Note that you can launch the System Restore GUI from a command prompt

%systemroot%\system32\restore\rstrui.exe

but I'm not sure if it's possible to execute an actual restore this way.

Solution 2

You could use wuinstall. It is a command line tool for managing Windows updates. Although there is no explicit command for undoing the last update, you can uninstall updates in several ways. The basic command is:

wuinstall /uninstall ...

There are many ways to select the updates to be uninstalled. For example:
/severity, /product, /match "regular expression", /nomatch, etc.

The command for uninstalling an update with a known KB number would be:

wuinstall /uninstall /match KB1234567

For more info, see here.

Solution 3

wuinstall is not part of system commands, you can use

wusa /uninstall /kb:<number>

and to see man page try wusa /?.

Comments

[Hastur]

Check this answer about wusa and the reference inside. Further reference about WUInstall. Please add some reference too to make your answer more complete.