Forum Discussion
October 2026 Windows Update causing major issues
We have had about 50 computers in our organization giving boot failures after Windows restarts to apply the October update, KB5127648. Affected machines are Dell devices, both laptops and desktops. The most common error message is "file missing or containing errors \windows\system32\winload.efi"
The only fix for now is to try booting into Safe Mode and uninstall the October update.
We use a 3rd party tool to patch our devices, Automox, but manually triggering updates from Windows Settings yields similar results. But what I have noticed is that when running Windows Update from Settings, multiple drivers and firmware udpates are also being installed, so I'm wondering if there is incompatibility with outdated stuff in our machines. So we're pushing Dell updates for drivers, firmware, and BIOS, along with Windows Updates hoping that this will take care of the issue.
Has anyone else experienced anything similar with this update? Or have any ideas on what may be the root cause in our case? Any feedback will be much appreciated.
21 Replies
We are currently seeing a very similar issue with two different customers, both using Dell OptiPlex Micro 7010 systems.
The devices fail to boot into Windows and end up in the Automatic Repair loop with “Your PC did not start correctly”. Since we have now seen the same behavior on two separate customer environments with the same Dell model, we are wondering whether this could be related to the October update, drivers, firmware, or BIOS.
Did you manage to identify the root cause or find a reliable fix? Did uninstalling KB5127648 solve the issue for you?
Removing the October update allows us to boot back into Windows, but from there we are using Windows Update settings to trigger the updates. This forces the machine to install driver and firmware updates along with the KB5127648. That seems to fix the issue.
So we think it's something related to outdated firmware in our devices.
We are seeing a very similar issue with two different customers, both using Dell OptiPlex Micro 7010 devices.
Both systems suddenly fail to boot into Windows and end up in Automatic Repair / “Your PC did not start correctly”.
Have you found a reliable solution or identified the root cause in your environment? Did uninstalling the October update resolve the issue permanently?
Where I don't have a fix, the correct way, make sure BIOS storage is set to whatever it normally uses (I say this because it was noticed that the storage was changing from AHCI to RAID and had to be changed back to AHCI) and disable secureboot, vt-d and vt-x, save and reboot.
