Bad Windows Update Problems

We’ve had a lot of Windows updates lately, but for some reason several of our servers failed to return to full functionality after patching. When you RD into the box, you get a plain blue screen after you login…it never goes away, same scenario from the console: no desktop. We can CTRL-SHIFT-ESCAPE and bring up the task manager and open the command shell, or launch other files, but anything that uses explorer.exe fails. explorer.exe isn’t even running in the task manager, and can’t be started manually.

This first happened on a single server a few weeks ago, and after 3 weeks of not being able to do anything with it, it just came back to life and started working. But no amount of restarts helped, or any known recover techniques. We just happened to have left it up after replacing it.

Now we have 3 boxes in the same state, they are still up and working so we leave them alone, but we can’t RD into them to change anything, and we are just too lazy to replace the boxes, and hoping they will come back to life one day like the other one did, but of course we can’t make any changed to anything via the GUI. Replacing them of course means pulling the drives and loading them into a new box to copy configurations off to. Not exactly a lot of fun.

This is a rather odd problem we haven’t seen before , and we can’t Google for “Blue Screen” or “Windows Update” without coming up with a bunch of unrelated problems. So we are kinda stuck on this one, I am hoping maybe somebody that has a lot of Windows boxes up has run into this problem as well.

 

 

 

 

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