Windows update consumed all of my hard drive

I blogged about "Surviving a botched windows update" two weeks ago after the December 12, 2017 Windows Update.  I thought my problems were behind me. I was so wrong.  It took almost two weeks to find and fix the problem. What a waste of time.

Here are the four symptoms:

1. Ran out of hard drive free space (200+ gb of free space suddenly disappeared)
2. Windows update stuck on 99%
3. "C:\Windows\Logs\CBS\CBS.LOG" grew to 200GB.  The file had 200,000 of these entries:  Current tick count lower than last tick count. [HRESULT = 0x8007000d - ERROR_INVALID_DATA] 
4. The Event Logs shows: "Installation Failure: Windows failed to install the following update with error 0x800706BE: 2017-12 Cumulative Update for Windows 10 Version 1709 for x64-based Systems (KB4054517)."

The solution:

I read the December 12, 2017—KB4054517 (OS Build 16299.125).  "When, what to my wondering eyes should appear, But a Knows Issues (1)."  The symptom reported in that KB:

Update installation may stop at 99% and may show elevated CPU or disk utilization if a device was reset using the Reset this PC functionality after installing KB4054022.

No kidding.

Here is an abbreviated version of the steps I took (from the KB article.) 

1. Download the appropriate version of KB4054022 for your device architecture from the Microsoft Update Catalog to c:\temp. Then run the commands in the steps below from the administrative command prompt.
2. Create a temp directory, expand the .msu file that you downloaded in step 1.
• mkdir c:\temp
• expand -f:* windows10.0-kb4054022-x64_da67baa74c09ad949d90823b25531731c3211184.msu c:\temp
3. End the existing Trusted Installer processes and install KB4054022 using the Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool.
• taskkill /f /im tiworker.exe
• taskkill /f /im trustedinstaller.exe
• dism /online /add-package /packagepath:c:\temp\Windows10.0-KB4054022-x64.cab
4. Delete the CBS logs from the Windows Logs directory.
• del /f %windir%\logs\cbs\*.log

Three days later things seem to be back to "normal."
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(1) Adapted from the poem "Twas the Night Before Christmas"

Surviving a botched Windows update: recover your Outlook profiles

I returned from a client meeting and saw a required reboot after a Windows 10 or Office 2016 Update (I'm not sure which).  After the reboot, the Windows startup said the boot drive was inaccessible.  After spending a half day trying to recover, I gave up and "recovered Windows 10."  Of course that meant I lost every installed application on my hard drive.  Recover kept my user files.  Fortunately most are stored on a different drive and on Sumatra's SAN and cloud drives.

The hardest part was recovering my Outlook Profile -- i was not looking forward to re-entering all of the credentials for my various email accounts.  Windows moved the old windows to a new folder "Windows.Old"  found my old registry hive, and was able to extract the Outlook Profile.

Here's the steps.   Thanks to JRich from Mass General for blog post that pointed me in the right direction!!

In Powershell, run as the administrator:
1. Use the REG command to load the "old hive" into your registry under the HK Local Machine

reg load 'HKLM\_OldOutlook' "C:\Windows.old\Users\riuliano\NTUSER.DAT"

2. Open RegEdit navigate to Outlook, i.e.
HKEY_Local_Machine\_OldOutlook\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Outlook\

3. In Regedit, right-click on "Profiles" and Export the file

4. Edit the exported profile file, and replace "Hkey_Local_Machine\_OldOutlook" with "HKey_Current_User\".  Save the file

5. Back in RegEdit, Import the "reg" file you just edited.

6. Back in Powershell, remove the registry key and garbage collect.
reg unload hklm\OldOutlook

[gc]::collect()

That's IT!



BTW, if you want to see what the director looks like in powershell, you can create a virtual directory of the old hive:
New-PSDrive -Name OldOutlook -PSProvider Registry -Root "HKLM\_OldOutlook"

then you can "cd OldOutlook:"
and get-item and value.  I'm sure i could have looped through and copied each profile key from the old hive to the new hive.  Export seemed much simpler, though.

Remember to remove the PSDrive:
Remove-PSDrive OldOutlook

Windows 10 and Calendar / Contact Privacy

For those of you who have upgraded to Windows 10 (and if you had Windows 8 this was a no-brainer), you HAVE to read:  Windows 10 is spying on almost everything you do – here’s how to opt out and Windows 10 defaults to keylogging, harvesting browser history, purchases, and covert listening and Digging into and Understanding Windows 10’s Privacy Settings. 

The most sober reading I've seen comes from Lifehacker.

Now since we're calendar geeks, we're going to show you how to keep your calendar and contacts private, which should be the default in the first place, but is not.

You do not have many choices in your Calendar.  If you want to use Cortona to set your appointments, it needs to check your calendar.  If you are worried Cortona is a nosy rhymes-with-witch who is ratting you out at every opportunity, then turn this off.

You have more choices in your Contacts -- but what "App connector" and "Windows Shell Experience" are is 1.) unclear 2.) why these are options for contacts but not calendar and 3.) WTF?  Microsoft support ducks the question not only about what they are but why they need specific access.

Short answer: beats the heck out of me -- but I dialed my privacy settings to the max.

My main previously unanswered question:  I'm happy with Windows 7 on my desktop.  How do I get rid of the Microsoft annoyanceware in my lower left hand corner?

Simple.

Click that nearly invisible "Up" triangle:

Then select: GWX "Hide icon and notifications"

Yeah!  I get to keep Windows 7!!!!!  And NOT be badgered about it!!!!!!

Our conversion server for Meeting Maker to Exchange still runs Windows XP.  I needed to take the darned thing off the network to make sure Microsoft / Java / Whoever didn't "improve" it by making it unusable with an automatic update.