Windows 10: KB5023778 Breaks Defender Offline Scan

Windows 11. It's all there in the title. I've installed and uninstalled it twice. Both times, offline scan was available in the options, but failed to start rebooting the machine. I've gone through the "upgrade in place" option.

:)

 

Defender Periodic Scanning or Offline Scanning?

That link does suggest it's useful to use Defender offline scanning in addition to periodic scanning and a third party real time anti virus (e.g. Kaspersky).

 

offline scan by win defender

Hi,

To further assist you with your concern with Windows Defender, follow the steps below:

• Open the Run window by pressing Window + R button.
• Then type services.msc and hit "Enter".
  
• Look for Windows defender service in the list and right click on it and select start.
• Once Windows defender is opened try to do the offline scan on that window.

Let us know how it goes.

 

Microsoft Defender Offline Scan

Restored the Macrium Image and got my Recovery partitions back:






So as expected, I had a bunch of updates to do:





After the updates, I gave Microsoft Defender Offline a try and it worked!









And this just shows that I'm back at the latest version build of 20H2:





This one was my fault and I admit I was the culprit of my own troubles. It was just a coincidence that I used Partition Wizard around the same time the Cumulative Updates were going on from Oct 28th to November 11th and it gave me the suspicion to suspect them being responsible for the Offline scan problem.

I mean who the heck would of ever thought that a Recovery Partition would have anything to do with an Offline Scan in an Online world?

A special thanks to OldNavyGuy for his suggestion that a Windows Recovery Partition being deleted was the problem.