Any way to stop a forced reboot in win7?

[Red Squirrel]

We recently got upgraded to windows 7 at work and they seem to do forced reboots. This is VERY impacting to our work especially on night shift when I'm the only one in the building.

I have local admin rights, is there something I can do to stop it? It's a dialog that has a count down to when it will reboot, with choice of being able to restart now.

Edit: Seems setting the clock back helps... but when the NTP server updates I might be screwed...

 

[Ketchup]

The only forced reboot I know of pertains to Windows Update. You could just take a time to get your machine completely up to date (the weekend perhaps), or just switch WU to manually install updates, and only allow them when you have time.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I think it's a system policy so it will probably reset if I change any settings. Night shifts are usually in stretches of 4 days so I come to work, turn on my computer, get all my screens up, and it needs to stay for at least 4 days.

I think stopping the WU service would have prevented the "system restart required" dialog from coming up in first place but now it's too late. I stopped the service but it's still wants to reboot. I managed to buy myself 72 hours so hopefully the NTP server does not update the time. There's one day on the weekend where a lot of the systems crap out at 4am, so I'll probably just reboot then.

I just have to remember to look at my phone to know the date or I'll be 3 days behind if I go by the computer.

 

[Ketchup]

Gotcha. Policy is going to be hard to work around any other way. Too bad they couldn't make an image with all updates and dish that out, but hopefully this will all be over in a day or two. Our company has laptops for everyone, so I just take it home every once it a while and let it update there (I work from home from time to time as well).

 

[Red Squirrel]

Gotcha. Policy is going to be hard to work around any other way. Too bad they couldn't make an image with all updates and dish that out, but hopefully this will all be over in a day or two. Our company has laptops for everyone, so I just take it home every once it a while and let it update there (I work from home from time to time as well).

Well even if they did, Windows 7 has updates practically daily, so depending on how often they go in to apply them through WSUS I have a feeling this will be at very least a weekly issue. Mentioned it to the boss though, hopefully he can push to make this end. It's even happened to people right in the middle of the day.

So far so good on the clock trick though...

 

[Ketchup]

Our guys usually push it to weekly if not farther apart, and I can't remember the last time I saw a forced reboot (never at this company) but I know every company is different. Once good thing is that if everyone is going through this, might be enough to push some change. Just because you are night shift doesn't mean you are any less important.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Well the clock thing seems to have worked in my favour. It just errored out saying that a system restart could not be completed at this time. It looks like the NTP server did in fact update the clock, which actually triggered the error. The timer is now frozen at 70 hours 26 minutes and 15 seconds.

I'm guessing stopping the services probably helped too. Hopefully it does not end up rebooting anyway... but time will tell.

Hopefully they'll fix this permanently though, they should do it like it was in the XP install, it would nag you but not force you to reboot. Then at the end of your shifts you shutdown and the updates get applied. Though come to think of it, maybe it's best to just reboot and leave the machine running.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Well that sucked, I thought the clock change worked out for me, but after a while it just randomly decided to reboot anyway. Having to reload all my stuff now, and lot of it will be locked out because it does that if you don't exit properly. :/ What a stupid design, absolutely under no circumstances should an operating system be able to force a reboot.

 

[xSauronx]

Well that sucked, I thought the clock change worked out for me, but after a while it just randomly decided to reboot anyway. Having to reload all my stuff now, and lot of it will be locked out because it does that if you don't exit properly. :/ What a stupid design, absolutely under no circumstances should an operating system be able to force a reboot.

how often is this happening to you? windows only gets updates once a month [typically] so it shouldnt need to update every few days. you should complain, if its a new roll out it may be they are open to some feedback if enough people gripe

which also means get some people griping

 

[Red Squirrel]

My win7 machine at home has updates daily - even twice in the same day, though I reboot it at my own leisure. Win 7 seems pretty aggressive with updates I find but guess its not a bad thing that they stay on top of it. At work it seems to be maybe once or twice a week at least. We've all complained about the reboots so hopefully something gets done.

 

[Ketchup]

Does your work machine have SP1? There were over 100 update after SP1 IIRC, but most of them are completed within the first two reboots.

If you continue to encounter this issue, you may want to try manually telling the computer to search for updates, and plan on a reboot when those are all completed.

FYI: On my home computer Windows 7 updates are generally what xSauronx has pointed out, about a month apart.

 

[Red Squirrel]

It is SP1 at work, I'd have to check at home. Been a while since I turned that machine on as I only using for gaming, but every time I go to use it there's a good 100MB of updates or so. Even when I do those updates a day later there's more. Then flash and everything else wants to update too... I could spend hours just updating and rebooting and not get anywhere because the next day there will be more. This is one thing the Linux world has gotten right, everything updates through one package manager, and there is no need to reboot all the time.

Already today my work one is saying there's more updates available, but it's not at the stage of wanting to reboot yet... Though it could be they just push a few updates at a time every day through WSUS too. Hopefully they fix this, if not I will have to look into making changes myself, but I don't want to touch anything for now, though it would be nice if there was a way to abort the count down.

 

[masteryoda34]

How long is the count down? You should be able to abort using:

shutdown -a

If the count down is 1 minute, just set a scheduled task to run that every 30 seconds or something.

Not pretty but it might work.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Shutdown -a was no go as it was the first thing I tried. It just said there was no shutdown in progress. The counter does not use the shutdown command, it's it's own thing. I notice the update notification icon in my task bar is gone now, the new updates probably installed, so it's probably going to reboot again soon. :/ I stopped the windows update service, so I'll see if I can at least last through my next 3 shifts then I'll reboot manually and let it turned on, that way it can reboot all it wants while I'm gone and catch up with any updates I stopped.

 

[sm625]

You can look in task manager to find the shutdown process. Sometimes it is a rundll32.exe, which you can just kill.

 

[MrChad]

This isn't a technical issue but a policy issue with your IT group. You need to raise a help desk ticket or conversation with your manager asking about this policy and how it impacts your work/productivity. Either they can exempt you from the reboot procedures or they can notify you of the schedule so that you can plan accordingly.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Yeah it's gone through my manager already and he told them to stop doing it. But this seems to be a question of the IT department having higher authority than any other department or manager so they probably wont listen. Basically it's not "our" IT department, but the higher up corporate one. Big companies, lot of hands in the pot, type situation. That bigger IT department basically rules our IT department.

I'm just thankful they at least agreed to give us local admin and take us out of the policies that deny execution of any exe file except for ones that are approved. Most of our apps would not work otherwise.

So far so good though with turning off WU service after a fresh reboot. The night shift guy got hit 3 times in a row with a forced reboot last night and my machine stayed up, though it's still early to tell if this trick works or not as the updates he got could have been ones I already got.

One thing I'm experimenting with is leaving my PC turned on at the login screen with WU service running when I'm not working, and when I am working I reboot before my first shift and login, turn off WU and do my set of shifts, then reboot at the end of my last shift. Hopefully this will work out. I told the others to try this too, we'll see how it goes.

I'm also thinking if I stop windows time service I might be able to use the clock reset trick too if this experiment fails. I could not remember the name of the NTP service and could not find it the first time then I realized it was called windows time and not ntp.

 

[SparkyJJO]

My win7 machine at home has updates daily - even twice in the same day, though I reboot it at my own leisure. Win 7 seems pretty aggressive with updates I find but guess its not a bad thing that they stay on top of it. At work it seems to be maybe once or twice a week at least. We've all complained about the reboots so hopefully something gets done.

The heck

Your home PC is weird man.

That, or you're using Security Essentials for your AV which utilizes Windows Update for its scheduled definitions updates, so manual updates makes it bug you constantly. Should almost never need a reboot though for that.

99% of the time My Win7 PC at home has one round of updates a month after Update Tuesday, occasionally there will be a second reboot from an update that needs installed by itself. Same thing happens with the dozen or so PCs I manage at work.

 

[Chiefcrowe]

Change the local policy setting to disable reboot for updates while a user is logged on. That's supposed to work anyway.

 

[Red Squirrel]

The heck

Your home PC is weird man.

That, or you're using Security Essentials for your AV which utilizes Windows Update for its scheduled definitions updates, so manual updates makes it bug you constantly. Should almost never need a reboot though for that.

99% of the time My Win7 PC at home has one round of updates a month after Update Tuesday, occasionally there will be a second reboot from an update that needs installed by itself. Same thing happens with the dozen or so PCs I manage at work.

There's probably a setting I can change for how often it checks for updates, just never bothered to check since I don't use that machine often. I have it set to whatever default is, which I think is every day. Guessing some updates require a secondary reboot because they could not install until another update depended on one of the updates that was installed. Just my guess.

 

[Ketchup]

I think part of the issue at home might just be Red Squirrel's frequency of use on that machine. We have an older laptop we use every now and then, and almost every time I pull it out it wants to reboot for updates.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Yeah that might have an effect too. Since it's a core i7 with add-on video card it uses a good 300-400w so I only turn it on as needed. It's probably so backlogged that I could spend a whole day just doing updates, but I have better things to do.

 

[imagoon]

Post in a few month:

Red Squirrel: So my WindOZE PC got PWNed [because I disabled the IT update process] and now they want to fire me. WTF! Fired because Windoze is so insecure.

 

[SparkyJJO]

There's probably a setting I can change for how often it checks for updates, just never bothered to check since I don't use that machine often. I have it set to whatever default is, which I think is every day. Guessing some updates require a secondary reboot because they could not install until another update depended on one of the updates that was installed. Just my guess.

Windows checks every day, by default. Point is Microsoft only releases updates once a month except for some rare occasions (drastic security breach needing immediate patch, etc).

But if you don't run it often then yeah I could see it just having a backlog.

 

[JoeBleed]

What i don't understand is that you know this is likely going to happen every time you turn on your computer, yet you don't go ahead and have windows check for updates to keep it from surprising you with a forced reboot.

I managed the WSUS where i work and because some people refused to install windows updates or reboot, i started forcing installs and reboots. though i set a date and time for the force to happen. Then i send out an email to let everyone know about it, usually a 5 days in advance. If they can't get it done or save their work by my set date, i just don't care. Sorry, i give notice, you can work around it. Plus i only do this once a month baring some sort of major update.

As others have said, either your computer is backlogged or possibly they're slowly pushing out a large group of updates. When you come into work, log in, and then go to control panel and run windows updates. Unless you check the option to check with Microsoft, it will only check it's assigned WSUS server. there you can see how many updates you have pending. With them being forced, you will get an error message if you click the install button because once you see that screen, if the force date has past, it's already installing in the back ground, thus it can't run that install. I wish it would just show you the progress, but it doesn't. however you can watch task manager or give it 5 minutes and have it check again and the number of updates will be less if it's still running.

As for your attempts at disabling the update service, you might get in trouble if you're discovered. messing with the system time may also get you in trouble as your work file time stamps are going to be off and may cause problems. If you get caught and cause your department to lose their local admin rights, you will not be a liked co-worker.