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I've done a clean install of Windows 2 weeks ago, and got 235 updates yesterday, it took roughly 2.5 hours to download them all.

When I booted back up today it was "Preparing to configure Windows" for 1 hour, and then "Failure configuring Windows Updates Reverting Changes Do not Turn off your pc" showed up

It hung / got stuck on this progress, and now whenever I boot up my PC it says "Preparing to configure Windows" for 3 seconds & then immediately goes to the "reverting changes" part.. which gets stuck immediately.

I can't spam the function keys on bootup as my keyboard will crash & not work.

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First download and create a bootable operating system, I'd suggest MiniXP from Hiren.

Boot into MiniXP and run net stop wuauserv then del %systemroot%\SoftwareDistribution\DataStore\Logs\edb.log (note this location may change when in MiniXP)

Once this is done, reboot your PC and attempt to install the updates again - check your AV to ensure it is not restricting the install.

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    if you can start in Safe Mode with Command Prompt then these commands also work from there. In my case wuauserv was not started, but moving the edb.log aside fixed the update lock-up. – mike Mar 13 '18 at 8:55
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Boot into Windows recovery environment and run a system repair few times. Probably 3 times. It should fix the boot and service related issues. Alternatively, try safemode and if you can get through, you can do a system restore.

If nothing works, please try this procedure. This also lists how you should get into the repair environment.

  1. If you are an experienced user, try booting into recovery console by pressing F8 continuously during start, click the recovery options from the boot menu.
  2. You may be prompted to choose a keyboard layout and language. You usually have no need to change these options.
  3. Click, Repair your computer.
  4. Click Next when you see the System Recovery Options dialog box.
  5. Click Cancel when you are presented with the options to recover your computer.
  6. Click View advanced options for system recovery and support.
  7. Click Command Prompt link in the next window.
  8. Navigate to the following location. *C:\Windows\WinSxS* If you are on the X drive (X:/>Source) change the partition to the Windows drive. As an example, type C: and press enter to change to C and type DIR and press enter to list the folders. If you see a Windows folder, that is the system partition. You could also use diskpart but I am not going to list it here. To change to the C:\Windows\WinSxS\ try the following commands. I am listing the basic method here. cd windows cd WinSxS
  9. Run the DIR command again and look for a file ending with 'pending.xml'.
  10. Now, rename it. Try this syntax: Rename filename.xml i.e. If the file has a long name, press the first character and press the tab key to automatically populate the full name. Let's assume the file name is 1234.pending.xml. Therefore, your command is: rename 1234.pending.xml backup This will change the name of the file to 'backup.
  11. Now, exit the command prompt by typing exit and reboot the computer. This should eliminate the pending tasks.
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My mother-in-law's win7 laptop was stuck in this boot loop. What worked for me was getting to the cmd line from the windows repair and running:

dism.exe /image:D:\ /cleanup-image /revertpendingactions

Got an error message the first time I ran it, ran a second time with no errors. Restarted and voila.

Credit to: https://www.404techsupport.com/2016/04/updates-reverting-loop-windows7/

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Here's an anecdote that might help you have some patience to wait out a very long update reversal, if you see your hard disk light very active during the rollback.

My computer took 8 hours to roll back a failed update, but it succeeded.

I believe the cause of my Windows Update failure was triggered by Windows Disk Cleanup tool, which I used for the first time the other day. Then Office wanted to do an update. I read many reports about Windows Disk Cleanup damaging the update files.

Despite the long process, I got back to the desktop, nothing was broken, but then I was out of disk space.

Looking around I found c:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\WER filled with files dated the same time of the rollback. The files were monstrous, like 400MB to 14GB! I'm guessing it took so much time writing these error dump files, and once it eventually ran out of disk space the roll back completed in minutes.

My theory - the more disk space you have, the longer the wait.

I manually deleted all that WER debris and am back running fine. (Delete was another long delay!)

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I am giving the simplest way out. When you get the repair options, click on windows image recovery, then don' select anything. Select, the 2nd option that is select a system image, and then click advanced and then it should open up windows explorer. Now go to D or C wherever windows is , then Software Update after that, you will see many folders, delete datastore,download,selfupdate,post boot event cache.Then cancel the image recovery and reboot, it will show configuring windows but within 5 minutes , pc will boot up. THIS IS 100% WORKING, GOT THIS SOLUTION WHILE EXPERIMENTING. AND WORKS WITH ALL PCS.

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