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I have a Windows Server 2008 R2 server which receives it's Windows Updates from an internal WSUS. The Security Only Cumulative Updates are approved for it to install.

This server had not installed updates for some time so had 6 of these cumulative updates waiting to install, and so I configured it to automatically install overnight.

It installed the very latest 18-03 Cumulative update successfully, it tried to install the older Cumulative updates and these failed. It then rebooted as usual and re-scanned to determine what it needs. So at the moment it still wants to install the older Cumulative updates, despite having the latest install.

Are Cumulative updates actually cumulative? Does it actually need to install the 5 earlier updates despite it having the latest one successfully installed, or is there some way of resetting it's Windows Update to make it properly re-scan for what it needs (ie. does it only want to install these updates still because it already had them downloaded).

Obviously I could just let it install them and reboot again, but I need to wait for another maintenance window to do that and I'd like to avoid it if they aren't actually necessary.

Thanks

Andrew

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  • Can you share those cumulative update KB numbers? Also, you can always try deleting the Software Distribution folder, and then "Check for Updates" would recreate that (note that you'll have to stop/start the Windows Update Service to achieve this). Apr 12, 2018 at 14:36

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It turns out I've fundamentally misunderstood how the Security Only updates actually work.

These are in fact not cumulative updates and so each Security Only update only contains the security fixes released during that month.

The options appear to be either apply all of the individual outstanding monthly Security Only updates (which is what it wants to do), or to approve and install only the latest Security Monthly Quality Rollup update which is cumulative and contains all previously released fixes (security and non-security).

There is a Microsoft Blog post which details this here.

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