If you’ve come here hoping for a rant against Microsoft, prepare to be disappointed. Microsoft released a patch on January 5th, 2018 to attempt to fix Meltdown/Spectre problems. That patch prevented one of my computers from booting after it was applied. I am not upset with Microsoft for causing this problem while attempting to fix another program because I understand that fixing some problems are really difficult, and what works on one CPU may not work on another. Fortunately for me, the computer affected by this patch was a computer I do not use often.
Unfortunately, this is a problem that would cause most people, anyone that does not consider themselves pretty good at fixing computer problems, from using the computer until they took it to someone else for repair.
Today I sat down to fix the computer. The computer runs Windows 7. The computer failed to boot on January 11th, 2018. I discovered the boot failure a few weeks later and then discovered that I could not even enter Windows Safe Mode after rebooting the PC. Knowing it would take some time to resolve the problem and that I might have a corrupt hard drive and never be able to resolve it, I put an attempt at resolution on hold.
Until today.
I used a Windows 10 bootable jump drive I already owned. My HP machine allows me to press the ESC key to get to the “Boot Menu” and from there I could select the Jump Drive. I chose to go to the command prompt. From there, I found my C: drive (which was named E: in this boot) and found that all my backup files still existed. I breathed a small sigh of relief then searched (dir /od) looking to find when the PC last successfully booted (which was January 11th), and I looked for an explanation of the problem by looking for what last happened on the machine. I saw that Windows Update had activity just prior to the failure. I then searched the Internet from another computer and quickly found the exact article I needed to fix the problem.
I used the information in the January 8th post by Wolfie1307 to run the following command and the command told me it succeeded (meaning that it successfully rolled back the attempted Windows Update).
dism /image:E:\ /remove-package /packagename:Package_for_RollupFix~31bf3856ad364e35~x86~~7601.24002.1.4(or whatever you copied) /norestart
It did not work for me on my first attempt because I was lazy and used the exact package name that Wolfie1307 provided in his/her post. I needed to change the package name to include x86 instead of amd64 for mine to succeed, and I found the name of that package in the WindowsUpdate.log
I rebooted my computer and it is working again!
Rob Kraft's Software Development Blog 