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Topic: Windows 7: Windows Update error 80070570
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 04-17-2015 10:29 AM
- Download the Surf file browser. {note}
- Open a command line shell (e.g. press the start button and enter "cmd" into the seach bar at the bottom)
- Enter the command "net stop wuauserv". Note - you must be logged in as an administrator, or this won't work.
- Using Surf, navigate to C:/Windows. Delete the folder called SoftwareDistribution entirely, and clean it from the recycling bin, too.
- Reboot the computer, ignoring any warning messages that appear to the effect that Windows Update is disabled and that bad things could happen to you.
- Again, logged on as an administrator, reopen the command line shell and enter "net start wuauserv".
- Run Windows Update, and it should complete without errors. However, it could take a long time - up to an hour - to "check for updates" and tell you which ones it needs, because it has to do a lot more looking at what versions of system files are on your machine than it would do if it had an update database.
What you're doing is to delete the database which Windows uses to keep track of what updates it's installed. This can get corrupted, usually when you shut down the computer or put it into standby (e.g. by closing the lid of a laptop) in the middle of background update installation, and the result of this can be errors when you try to update in future. In my experience, the steps above make about 95% of updating problems go away.
Once you restart the update service with this folder deleted, it'll rebuild the database and you should be good. The only gotcha is that it'll forget which updates are there, and so if you look at the update history it'll be empty. But if you don't mind that, this should work.
{note} Windows 7's built in security won't let you delete some files you need to delete using Windows Explorer, but Surf will. If you're trying to correct this problem on XP or Vista, you don't need to bother with Surf.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 04-18-2015 12:46 PM
Because Windows Explorer and the command line shell won't let you delete the SoftwareDistribution folder, even if running as an administrator. I'm guessing that Microsoft is figuring that anything trying to do that has to be malware. How Surf circumvents this I don't know, but it does. Same deal trying to edit start menu items in Windows 7. Windows Explorer won't let you delete "all users" shortcuts and folders from the start menu, but Surf will.
What Microsoft's programmers didn't figure on, I guess, is that the Windows Update software is so flaky that it hangs up frequently and needs to be reset as if the computer had never been updated fairly regularly.
My preferred solution to this is to make system images, both of my home PCs and those in the booths (I use Clonezilla, but there are other options out there) every month or so, so that if this happens, or a malware infection, I can just nuke the whole Windows partition, reinstall a "known good" one and update from there.
To be fair, Windows is not the only OS that seems to have unreliable updating infrastructure. I've had refusals to update once or twice with Ubuntu, too. sudo apt-get update followed by sudo apt-get upgrade has always fixed it for me.
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 04-20-2015 11:02 AM
quote: Scott Norwood
Sad to say, many Windows issues like this one are more expediently resolved by wiping and re-installing the operating system than by actually troubleshooting them and figuring out the reason for the failure....
I tend to go with this route if any of my PCs start doing strange things or just start running slow, particularly when booting. A "factory reset" can clean out all the garbage.
One downside to this approach: you need to keep your application installers, device drivers and data organized and backed up if it's something that was downloaded. Most computer users generally do not do this regardless of the computing platform they use. They just cruise along doing reckless, risky things with their machines. When they run into a problem a simple factory reset will be a desructive option.
I generally do not leave any files of value stored on the boot hard disc. I have the files I want to keep copied on 2 or more external hard drives. I don't download e-mail to my computer; I keep it up in the cloud. It's one less thing to worry about if I need to reset my computer.
Factory resets are no guarantee in making a system run perfectly, unfortunately. It's rare, but I have had a couple experiences where, after resetting the system, installing all those OS updates, re-installing my applications & their updates, I might find some odd new behavior in the computer that annoys the hell out of me. There are so many endless combinations in how things get loaded that you could literally have two identical machines that end up behaving differently.
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