Windows 10: Windows Permanently Requesting to Restart Outside of Active Hours

For a few months now my laptop has been incessantly informing me that it will restart outside of active hours to finish installing updates. The problem? The updates fail to install every time, no matter how many restarts it attempts.


Given how annoying the occasional overnight restart can be, it's somewhat frustrating to have that restart constantly queued.


From some basic research, there seems to be several possible reasons that these updates might be failing, but getting to the end of the rabbit hole with most of them tells me I need to perform some form of update or system restart which will effectively wipe all my files, which is, to say the least, inconvenient. Further complicating the situation is the fact I have my D: drive set up as my default drive for new software installation and various other things, because my laptop has a huge HD D: drive and a small SS C: drive, and apparently Windows finds it bamboozling that someone would want to actually use the larger of their two drives to store things on. This seems to cause even more hiccups in the process of "I would like to update X so that update Y will stop failing so that my computer doesn't periodically close all my applications while I'm not looking.", which is even more of a pain.


In short, I would like to fix whatever is stopping my updates from installing on restart, preferably without performing a system restore or anything which will wipe my files and applications.


If it is necessary to wipe my files and applications, this is manageable, but I will need some way of setting up my D: drive as the drive which contains MyDocuments, Program Files, etc, upon completing this restore in a way which won't cause these problems again.


Are either of the above possible? If so, how?

:)

 

windows 10 is NOT restarting after a windows update even if is outside of active hours.

I start windows updates on my system and leave for dinner, expecting the updates to be finished and the system re-booted when i return.

when i return at 7:30 pm (outside of active hours) i find the update status screen with a status of "awaiting restart"

"your device is scheduled to restart outside of active hours. (Active hours are 8:00 am to 5:00 pm)"

If i click on "restart now" everything completes normally.

I have a screen print showing this information along with the system clock showing that the current time is outside of active hours (is it possible to post that screen print here?)

This is NOT a new problem and actually happens on more than one PC, but i am getting tired of going though the extra steps and waiting for completion of this process that should have already finished while i was away from my PC.

Why won't my system reboot outside of active hours after updates are complete?

Windows 10 pro

version 1709

os build 16299.334

Active hours are 8am to 5pm.

 

windows 10 is not restarting during scheduled to restart outside of active hours.

It has now been 4 days since my computer began saying "Your device is scheduled to restart outside of active hours. (Active hours are ‏‎6:00 AM to ‏‎6:00 PM.)" It did this during the October update, also, I finally clicked on "restart now" to get it to
finish the install.

Before the October update is was doing the updates automatically, any ideas on why it is not working the way it is suppose to now.

 

Delaying restart for updates beyond 'active hours'


Thanks, I'll have a look..

I can now confirm that using 'Don't Sleep' (a tiny freeware program to optionally block sleep/restart/shut down) does mean that your PC will not restart even with a restart pending for a Windows update outside the 'active hours' period which is limited to 12 hours max in Settings.