What to do when Windows 7 appears to hang during the installation of updates?
Solution 1
What to do when Windows 7 appears to hang during the installation of updates?
1. Solve the Halting Problem
Obviously you ought to try to decide if the machine's really frozen. The main indicator you can look for is hard drive activity. If your hard drive LED is blinking, the machine's probably still doing something. If you don't have an LED, put your ear to the machine and listen for disk activity. Similarly, if you see heavy blinking on your network card, it may just be downloading some delicious MS-certified spyware (etc). If the machine really appears to be doing stuff, then leave it. If many hours (>5) pass with no change on the screen, it's probably hung.
2. Make a decision
Once you've decided your machine is indeed frozen, you have two basic choices:
- Pretend it's not frozen, until a power surge frees you
- Reboot (press your reset button, or hold in your power button for many many seconds)
It's just that simple.. If it's frozen, all you really can do is reboot and hope that your file system's in good enough shape that it takes care of everything. Else, you get go learn about recovering your data and reinstalling your OS.
Solution 2
It is best not to unplug the computer or press the reset button, chances are you can corrupt the disk. The best thing to do would be to press the power button on the computer, it would either shutdown the computer or hibernate depending on the power settings. You can then restart and see if it starts normally or safe mode can be selected at startup.
Solution 3
Last time mine did that (a week ago) I did a hard restart, when it restarted, Windows System Restore automatically fired off during boot and rolled the system back, then I did a windows update again, this time I installed the updates one at a time.
Windows 7 Pro 64bit.
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Nathan Osman
I am a software developer fluent in C++, Python, and JavaScript. I enjoy writing desktop tools, server software, and web applications. When writing programs with C++, I take advantage of the excellent Qt framework. On the Python side, I find that Django is hard to beat when it comes to ease of use and minimal configuration. I almost never write JavaScript without using jQuery. You can find a somewhat comprehensive list of software that I have written on my website: http://quickmediasolutions.com I've also written a few articles ([1], [2], [3]) for the SuperUser blog.
Updated on September 18, 2022Comments
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Nathan Osman almost 2 years
The following message has been displayed on the screen for the last almost hour or so:
I'm guessing something went wrong and it's stuck in some sort of infinite loop or it's waiting for some event that didn't happen.
Anyway, at what point should I assume that the update failed? What steps should I take - considering the text states "..do not power off or unplug your machine.."? Is this because a hard reset will cause problems with filesystem consistency?
This machine (as you can see in the screenshot) is running Windows 7 Starter, if that helps.
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Nathan Osman almost 13 yearsNothing is getting downloaded and the HD activity light blinks every so often but it's not as busy as it usually is for an update.
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user3486703 almost 13 yearsHope that you don't have an SSD :)
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James T Snell almost 13 yearsYeah George, I don't think there's much to do. You can wait or not. You probably have a journaled file system, so it's probably okay. Once you reboot, tell it to do a scandisk (will require another reboot). THEN, re-run Windows Update.. Maybe someone else with have a better tip, I kind of hope so, I just doubt there is one to give, sadly. -
Francesco Belladonna almost 11 yearsI have an SSD on pci-e... No hdd led, no sound, argh!
