Windows 10 update stuck after restart with message "Working on updates 0%"

Question

I'm trying to install the Windows 10 update 1803 which is the big feature update for April 2018. It downloaded fine and gave a warning about a long update process. I confirmed starting to update and the PC worked for a while and then restarted.

Since then it has been stuck on the message: "Working on updates 0% Don't turn off your PC, this will take a while". It's been around 2.5 hours and no change is seen. The wheel is spinning though so it's not like the software is completely stuck.

What is a typical time for this kind of update? I searched online and all I could find is cases where it's taking a few hours but never where it was stuck at 0%.

At what point do I try to restart the PC? 8 hours? a day?

Answer 1

After 3.5 hours of 0 progress I decided to restart my PC. After restart windows restored itself to its state prior to the update which is great. Nice one Microsoft! This is the right way to handle a failed update.

Not really an answer to the question "would it have finished given more time?" but I didn't know it could come back and I was worried restarting might brick my Windows installation so this might be useful to someone.

EDIT: Retrying this a few days later (without my permission) ended up with a successful upgrade. Another computer also upgraded on its own to 1803.

Answer 2

I went a little further. I left mine overnight with no apparent progress. when I restarted it was essentially broken. I was able to do a restore preserving my files - so called. At least I could get at the data files that had changed since my last backup sereral days earlier and then restore - a mammoth 6-hr task as my backups have maximum compression - then replace the changed files. Now a day later it wanted to do a boot update so I did (naive fool), with the same result. This time was after my next backup so I had done very little.This time. I got a message "Restoring your previous version of Windows" but ended up in the same mess. When it finishes restoring again I will be investigating whether it is posible to apply the upgrade incrementally

Answer 3

Probably OP didn't experience the same issue as I did, but in case anyone in the future would find this question searching for this symptom, but felt none of the answers applied to them (as I did), here's what happened to me:

Installing Windows 10 1809 stuck at 0% after restart, with no apparent hope that it would ever progress further. Force-restarting the computer triggered the restoration process (which completed surprisingly quickly), however, not long after I logged in, Windows started downloading and installing the update again, which ultimately lead me to the "0% situation" over and over again, numerous times – a seemingly unbreakable cycle.

What made my case possibly special (but definitely not unique) is that this happened to an old, (originally) Windows 8 tablet, with very limited internal storage. As such, when installing feature updates in the past, Windows always complained that I don't have enough free space to complete the installation, and offered me the choice to either free up more space, or plug in an external storage to supplement the available free space. Previously, I've always chosen the latter, and it always worked well – that is, before update 1809.

Long story short, taking the time to free up more space, and not using the external storage option, the update completed successfully on the first try. So, in my case, that was the solution.