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Windows IT

Windows 11 Will Let You Reinstall Your OS Through Windows Update Without Wiping Your Files (xda-developers.com) 111

An anonymous reader writes: If you've ever performed a fresh reinstall of Windows 11, you'll know how long it takes and how much effort you need to make to get it started. Fortunately, Microsoft is taking note. As spotted in a recent update to the Windows 11 beta branch, the company is working on a way to reinstall your operating system through Windows Update, and no files are lost in the process.

The newest update to the Windows Insider beta branch has added a new feature titled "Fix Problems using Windows Update." The feature is still a work in progress, so it doesn't work as it should right now. However, if you're on the Windows 11 Insider beta branch, you can see the button for yourself on the Recovery page, among the Windows 11 backup settings.

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Windows 11 Will Let You Reinstall Your OS Through Windows Update Without Wiping Your Files

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  • what? plug in a usb stick, click a few buttons, tell it where to install and walk away for about 5 min?

    • by znrt ( 2424692 ) on Tuesday December 26, 2023 @05:34PM (#64107409)

      i guess it refers to backing up and restoring user files. most users don't do regular backups, and by today's standards it's easy to quickly accumulate gigabytes and gigabytes of data which is "personal", and which takes a while to move around on cheap removable media.

      that said, i would never use such functionality on windows without a proper backup ... which makes such a functionality completely superfluous, but well ... of all "innovations" windows has brought lately, this one is probably the least problematic and easy to skip. just let them keep working on that.

      • You have to wipe the whole disk to install a newer version of Windows (or reinstall it)?

        That blows my mind...

        • by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

          not really, one can upgrade their way from windows 3 up to 10 or 11 without ever formatting the disk ... there was a rash of youtube video's showing this a few years ago with outrageous thumbnails of some dipshit doing their best fake shocked face

          though in the older versions where they tend to bloat themselves to the point of being non functional, there was a good reason, not as much anymore unless the system gets hosed (like this machine technically at one point this was a windows 7 install that got upgrad

          • Windows 3? Don't be so hyperbolic. The disk io drivers and shit aren't there. You'd be hard pressed to go from XP to 11. XHCI drivers for modern hardware don't exist for old windows. Even USB would be challenging pre-7 at times.
            • by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

              you dont need drivers if your using IDE, or SATA in "legacy" or "IDE Mode" its handled by the bios.
              One of my hobbies is fixing up old computers so I have a old tower PC in the garage, its a 6 core Phenom II with 8 gigs of ram and a 250gig SATA drive in it, I partitioned off 20 gigs to FAT32 and 2 gigs to FAT16 and it happily boots into MS-DOS 6.22 and windows 95 (with the rest of the space given to Linux Mint, though it will run windows 10 ok enough) and yea it wont recognize a lot of hardware but file mana

          • by JSG ( 82708 )

            Win 3 used FAT as a file system. Modern Windows (for want of a better word) uses NTFS and ReFS. I wont bore you with FAT16 vs FAT32 and vFAT and all that shite.

            I wasted hours/days/weeks etc fiddling with himem.sys and autoexec.bat. I had a boot disc featured on Novell's Cool Solutions, which managed to get a network up and running etc. Memory management back in the day, mandated by MS was wank - really wank. That was Windows 3.x and frankly Win 95 and on wasn't much better.

            • by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

              yea cause microsoft never made a conversion utility, first time I found out about it was in windows 2000 (might have been there in NT4, not sure)

              hell I just checked its still there in windows 10

              convert /?
              Converts a FAT volume to NTFS.

              CONVERT volume /FS:NTFS [/V] [/CvtArea:filename] [/NoSecurity] [/X]

              volume Specifies the drive letter (followed by a colon),
              mount point, or volume name. /FS:NTFS Specifies that the volume will be converted to NTFS. /V Specifies that Convert will be run in verbose mode. /CvtArea:filename
              Specifies a contiguous file in the root directory
              that will be the place holder for NTFS system files. /NoSecurity Specifies that the security settings on the converted
              files and directories allow access by all users. /X Forces the volume to dismount first if necessary.
              All open handles to the volume will not be valid.

            • by Scoth ( 879800 )

              There were also conversion utilities built into various versions of Windows both to convert FAT16 to FAT32 and FAT to NTFS. There are plenty of videos out there of people upgrading versions of Windows all the way from 1 to 7, 8, 10, 11, whatever is current. It ends up pretty messy by the end but technically works.

              As far as memory management, while DOS was a mess by Windows 95 you could get away with not really ever touching it if you didn't want/need to. If you still had some higher-complexity DOS stuff to

      • by EvilSS ( 557649 )
        Start/Settings/System/Recovery/Reset this PC then select Keep my personal files. Or hit start and type reset, and it should show up.

        The difference here with this new feature is that it seems to also preserve Windows settings and applications. Not sure why someone would actually want that, since you are usually doing a reset because some combination of applications and/or settings is fucking something up.

        Of course, if Windows had a decent system backup/restore feature built in, one users could easily use
        • Yeah gotta give Apple credit on that front, I remember doing Time Machine restores and doing OSX reinstalls with no extra devices like a decade ago (just go into boot manager and it downloads the OS).

          Of course they have an advantage of "If you own a Mac then you own the OS" but even today Microsoft's amalgam of various tools is nowhere as clean cut as Apples method for restores and reinstallations.

        • by xeoron ( 639412 )
          Sounds like they are trying to copy MacOS: it can reinstall the OS in recovery mode and keeps all apps, settings, files in place. Learned this one day when a system update was caught in a reboot and try to apply loop, with Apple Support walking me through the reinstall the OS only part and it worked.
        • Could they be trying to make a front end or graphical replacement to SFC or DISM?

          sfc /scannow
          Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /ScanHealth
          Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth
          https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/repair-a-windows-image?view=windows-11 [microsoft.com]
        • by Scoth ( 879800 )

          If I had to guess based on nothing but speculation, this probably basically wipes the driver caches of driver updates/third party installed ones, forcing the system to use included (or maybe only fully vetted) drivers, resets dlls and other libraries to known-good versions and refreshes the WinSxS setup, and maybe resets some core part of the registry. A large part of Windows issues are drivers getting screwed up in some way or system files getting mixed up. Probably something to make sure malware is taken

      • What about apps? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Latent Heat ( 558884 ) on Tuesday December 26, 2023 @06:36PM (#64107571)

        Personal files are no biggie. There are only a few directories where one has them, and a USB drive is your friend.

        The part everyone hates about a Windows clean install or getting a new computer is reinstalling your application programs. That your apps don't transfer over is a feature, not a bug, I guess to the people selling you those apps.

        Nowadays, it is nothing like olden times when I had dozens of specialty programs purchased on CD-ROMs or gosh forbid, floppy disks, with authentication keys crammed into my sock drawer. Free software has replaced most of those.

        But still, when I buy a new computer, I will have to keep the old box for 7 years, which is the time you may be asked to correct a tax return with your paid-for tax software.

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          You can make it less painful using Chocolatey to manage the software in your machine (it's a Linux style package manager). It's not perfect, updates are often slow, but it mostly gets the job done.

          In theory your settings should be preserved as they are part of your user profile. I wonder if this feature manages to keep them.

      • by Targon ( 17348 )
        When you run the Windows 10 or 11 install from the flash drive while within Windows, it will do it as an "upgrade" to the version you already have, no need to back up at that point. It will keep your existing installed programs and EVERYTHING. It's the same overall process as upgrading from Windows 7, 8, or 8.1 to Windows 10, but you can also use it to fix corrupted files that can't be fixed in any other way.
    • by Anonymous Coward
      Yes, installing only takes a few minutes.

      But wrangling Windows into a useful state takes an absurdly long time. It takes hours to unfuck everything, delete all the useless crap that gets installed and change all the settings needed to actually make Windows work properly.
  • I just teach people about msconfig and how to use the task manager (though I do suggest sysinternals or even process hacker). I'll go through their BS and question them. Do you really need this? Let's uninstall it then! Don't need this to run at boot? Disable that! At the end they have all their important shit and none of the bullshit. They pay me a hundred bucks and most never need to consult me again because I'm a pretty good teacher.
    • There are several great 'Windows debloater' scripts out there that you can use after an install to remove all that cruft and crap. Running a debloater script is literally the first thing I do after installing Windows.

  • by Alain Williams ( 2972 ) <addw@phcomp.co.uk> on Tuesday December 26, 2023 @05:27PM (#64107393) Homepage

    where people try this and it fails and deletes files. I can hear now users saying "I thought that it meant that I did not need to do a backup".

    • I can hear now users saying "I thought that it meant that I did not need to do a backup".

      You don't need to do a backup, it's just that if you don't then you won't have your files afterward. So technically they're correct.

  • I mean iOS and Android have been doing clean updates without needing to do anything complicated. But that's to be expected since they aren't based on a 40 year old microcomputer operating system design.

    • Linux is based on an OS much older. And yet we have been updating to new versions with no file loss for ages. So it isn't really about age, just design.

      But the article is about RE-installing the same version of MS-Windows on top of itself to "solve problems." I have no idea if Linux distros do this- but I have also never had or seen the need.

      • The only time I've had to do a clean install of Linux was about a decade ago and that was because something had gone so wonky that the only kernel that would boot was from the previous version of the OS. And even then, I didn't have to worry about my personal files because /home is always on its own partition.
      • Linux distributions are collections of software and have been using package managers for a while.

        You can verify packages with rpm -V or dpkg --verify

        The following command will reinstall all of the packages.
        sudo aptitude reinstall '~i'
      • Linux is based on a minicomputer design, not a microcomputer design. There are some real compromises made 50-60 years ago when you had to build a computer from a one or two chip control processor instead of something like a pricey PDP-11. (although not expensive like a Burroughs mainframe)

        Linux distros that can reinstall themselves very easily exist. Flatcar and a few others have a read-only root file system. Everything has to be created as overlays on top of the base system. And you can, with some caveats,

  • Nice to see Windows add this. macOS has offered such for quite a few years and it certainly comes in handy at times.

  • by kmoser ( 1469707 ) on Tuesday December 26, 2023 @06:07PM (#64107499)
    This is glossing over the elephant in the room, which is the fact that you would ever need to do a clean reinstall of WIndows at all. If they programmed the damned thing correctly, and it included diagnostics that prevented cruft from accumulating, you wouldn't need to resort to Draconian tactics like reinstalling the entire OS.

    Oh, and why would a reinstall even touch your desktop and user files? This shouldn't be an issue.
    • by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

      its generally not an issue, I can't remember when I did a total reinstall on my daily driver

      • by kmoser ( 1469707 )
        Ignorance is bliss. Had you done a total reinstall, who knows how much more efficiently it would have run?
        • by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

          quick check, um running 2% cpu load with this chrome window open and 3 tabs with 36% of my 16 gigs in use... all my critical temps are in the mid 30's and its been a couple months since I blew out the fans

          I am sure the difference would be negligible

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed. This is still apparently pretty common. Stone-age quality level software.

    • by unrtst ( 777550 )

      Oh, and why would a reinstall even touch your desktop and user files? This shouldn't be an issue.

      Right!?!?!

      Linux:
      * Why would you ever need to do a reinstall of the same version over the existing install!?!?!
      * Regardless, you can do it in one command: sudo aptitude reinstall '~i'
      * Retain user files? Simple. Don't reformat /home and you're done.

      I'm still shocked there are so many windows fanboi's posting on here. Their existence is understandable, but continuously opening themselves up for ridicule by defending shit like this? Wow
      (referring to other posts, not the parent, of course)

    • by Reziac ( 43301 ) *

      Barring catastrophic hardware failure (which usually results in "Well, maybe now I'll upgrade the OS too"), in 30 years I have never done a reinstall of Windows on my own hardware, and have had some installs (most of them, actually) that were daily drivers or heavy lifters for over ten years without a single crash. (And some with uptimes measured in years, too.) However, I don't run it on crap hardware. Windows is very much canary in coal mine for shit hardware/drivers. If it crashes a lot, throw out the PC

  • by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Tuesday December 26, 2023 @06:11PM (#64107521)

    No way on this planet, of any planet in the universe, would I trust Microsoft not to screw up or delete personal files when doing an in place reimage. We've all seen the horrors of this company and its botched updates which only target a small percentage of files. Imagine how bad an entire reimage will be with your files on the line.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Trust Microsoft? That would be a sign or a serious mental defect!

    • I've done this many times, and it works perfectly.

    • by dwywit ( 1109409 )

      I've had to do in-place re-installs on W10 for a few customers.

      Regardless of assurances, I always backup the entire user profile.

      But IME the re-install either works as intended (with user data unaffected), or (rarely) not at all, i.e. it fails very early in the process with a vague error message "something went wrong", so instead of hunting down the error logs and trying to fix it, it's easier and faster to do a clean re-install - and I've already got the user data backed up.

      I've *never* had a re-install th

  • Car analogy (Score:4, Funny)

    by fleeped ( 1945926 ) on Tuesday December 26, 2023 @06:41PM (#64107575)
    Manufacturer: "We heard your feedback that our car's engine stops frequently, and we've now improved it to restart FASTER".
    • "We heard your feedback that our car's engine stops frequently, and we've now improved it to restart FASTER".

      "We heard your feedback that our car's engine stops frequently, and we've now improved it so that we can replace the engine without destroying the stuff in the trunk"
    • by mjwx ( 966435 )

      Manufacturer: "We heard your feedback that our car's engine stops frequently, and we've now improved it to restart FASTER".

      That's not actually a bad analogy.

      Frequent engine issues are usually the result of a bad owner.

      In the Olden Days of Windows XP, you did have to regularly re-install to recover from Win rot (the OS slowing down significantly), since Win 7 the state of Win rot has decreased to the point where I buy a new PC before feeling the need to re-install Windows. Yes, I know we don't like to admit that MS actually did something properly on /. but these days whenever I see a Windows install beyond use it's because

  • Huh? (Score:5, Informative)

    by christoban ( 3028573 ) on Tuesday December 26, 2023 @06:55PM (#64107615)

    There's already been an option to reinstall Windows with "Keep My Files" since Windows 10. It doesn't wipe the disk, but you do have to reinstall your apps, which takes a few hours of manual effort. I guess this does even less, and leaves your apps intact? That would be nice, if correct.

    If you use a Microsoft account, you can even do a full wipe and just let your profile folder restore itself, or (re)install Windows on another PC and your profile folders will redownload there. This is what I do every year or so.

    • There's thing called "Begging the question". It doesn't mean "this requires asking the question". It means "there is a question BEING IGNORED and we're GOING TO IGNORE IT going forward."

      This discussion has two begged questions.
      1. Why on earth would you re-install an OS on a working system?
      and
      2. Why on earth would you wipe user files as well?

      Answer:
      Microsoft has always produced a pseufo OS that doesn't clean up after itself. In time it gets slower and worse in performance. A "reinstall" is the "solution"

      • 1. Why on earth would you re-install an OS on a working system?

        You wouldn't.

      • It means "there is a question BEING IGNORED and we're GOING TO IGNORE IT going forward."

        Begging The Question means you are assuming as true the very point in question rather than building a convincing case to prove it.

      • 1. Partially working system.
        2. Cleaning an infection.

        Not making excuses for Mickeyshit, though. It is indeed crap.

      • It is perfectly normal for a desktop system, with heavy use, to become less stable over time (especially if you use a lot of development tools).

        Windows has never become totally broken for me in less than 18 months, but dev tools are far more to blame than the OS. Deteriorating hardware is probably even more to blame. And yes, you can mess your system up just with personal configuration in your profile/user directory.

        Windows DOES have one design issue that causes slow downs and issues over time, which they

    • You've never really tried to reinstall Windows, have you?

      Last year, someone brought me a Windows 11 laptop that refused to boot. I've worked with almost every version of Windows since 95, but this was my first time touching Windows 11. Blue screen every time, even when trying Safe Mode. The USB recovery media insisted that there were only two options: repair or reset. When I tried to repair, it just told me, "unable to repair" with no further info. When I tried reset, it explicitly told me it would not

      • Your experience is unusual. I do know what I'm talking about.

        There IS an option to "wipe, but keep my files," and it's been there at least since Windows 10. It sounds like there was a hardware issue going on on that machine, probably the SSD was failing. If those recovery system files are accessible or corrupt it would explain why you had fewer options.

  • by paul_engr ( 6280294 ) on Tuesday December 26, 2023 @07:24PM (#64107693)
    Now do it with the ability to un-install 11 and go back to Windows 10.
  • Sometimes, the reason to reinstall the OS, is really due to an app install that went awry. Apps often update random registry settings and OS files everywhere, sometimes affecting other apps. This can require wiping the hard drive and starting over. This feature from Microsoft won't help in such cases.

  • I just did this like a month ago on Windows 10.
  • by TwistedGreen ( 80055 ) on Tuesday December 26, 2023 @08:29PM (#64107859)

    Huh? Windows has done this for years, since Windows 8 actually. It's called "Windows Refresh." I actually used it once to solve some driver issues, and it worked well. Is this something new?

  • Fix Problems (Score:4, Interesting)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Tuesday December 26, 2023 @09:25PM (#64107993)

    Fix Problems by reinstalling the problem over and over? How does that work?

    • According to Einstein it's the definition of insanity.

    • by Targon ( 17348 )
      If your Windows files are corrupted, then doing an "upgrade" to the latest version of Windows 10 or 11 may fix the problem, as long as Windows is running well enough to allow the "upgrade" to go through. Upgrading to the same version of Windows 10 or 11 has been a somewhat simple fix for a lot of problems since 2015.
    • Cheaper than getting tech support to help you. If it saves the company time and money, it's a proper fix.

  • Dear Valued Customer. We are sorry that something in the breakfast we just served caused you to flee to the washroom, racked by violent contractions of the muscles controlling your stomach and bowels. When you return from the toilet, please accept this identical meal, provided free of charge by us.

  • Windows 11 will LET me do something? Fantastic. They are doing god's work over in Redmond.
  • by twocows ( 1216842 ) on Wednesday December 27, 2023 @09:27AM (#64108849)
    If this is a substitute for in-place upgrade, it's actually much appreciated. An in-place upgrade is where you run the Windows installer for your current version of Windows from inside your current Windows environment (you can't boot into it; you have to run the setup utility from inside your current Windows environment for it to work properly). This reinstalls Windows using the same process you would use to upgrade from one major version of Windows to another, leaving everything other than the Windows system files intact, including your user profile, application data, settings, and registry data. It's great for problems that the classic sfc/dism combo isn't able to fix for whatever reason and it's a little less intrusive than the "Reset my PC" function, which resets a lot of state data so that you're closer to a clean install (I'm also not sure if that function actually replaces all the system files or just resets state data).

    If Windows Update is able to just do this on its own with a button, that's actually a useful addition.
  • by Torodung ( 31985 ) on Wednesday December 27, 2023 @10:00AM (#64108909) Journal

    This functionality can be obtained just by sticking a Win 11 install disc in a drive and doing an update (no drive wipe) rather than a full install.

    What I really want is my Win32 program installs (Office, Photoshop, Firefox, Games) to stick around through an OS reinstall. If that's what this means, it is a welcome relief.

    But keeping user files/profiles on reinstall has been around since forever. Definitely back to Windows 8. The only thing I'm seeing here is you don't have to put in a DVD or Rufus iso drive. I bet it just sticks a current iso into the recovery partition. It is a mild convenience at best if this is the case.

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