Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Windows 10 issued a new update, and not long after it hit public release, Microsoft had to pull it back.
The latest offender was “Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. – SCSIAdapter – 9.3.0.221”, a Windows-recommended driver for AMD users. The problem? The driver was stopping some users’ PCs from booting, and the patch has since been pulled from the Windows Update list.
But the real problem here, as noted by Windows Latest, is that Windows Insider users had already flagged the driver as being dodgy. It was bad enough that users had to resort to some command line kung fu to nuke the update, which is a whole nightmare that nobody should have to go through.
Not all AMD users had the patch pushed to them, as is customary with the staggered nature of how Windows rolls out updates these days. Even though AMD are the ones responsible for making the driver, Microsoft’s responsible for pushing it out to users — and they’re doubly responsible for pushing out a patch from the insider branch to a wider release, after users called it out as problematic.
If you see the driver in your Windows Update list as pending for download, here’s how to make sure you won’t install it by accident:
- Open the Show or Hide Updates Troubleshooter tool — you’ll have to download this separately. Microsoft doesn’t appear to host this tool directly anymore, but some other forums (like Tenforums) have it saved here.
- Click next
- Select “Hide Updates”
- Uncheck the AMD SCSIAdapter – 9.3.0.221 update
- Close
This will ensure the update doesn’t even appear as an “optional” patch within Windows Update, so there should be no risk going forward.
If your AMD system has been stuck in a boot loop recently because of the patch, however, you might want to reinstall Windows 10 via a USB stick. The Media Creation Tool, which you can download here, will create a Windows 10 image on any USB stick that’s 8GB or larger: just run the tool, boot from the USB drive and then run the repair process to get back to normality. And if you have downloaded any major Windows 10 updates recently, you might want to check your GPU drivers as well.
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