Problems updating Windows 10 on 8 GPU Nvidia rig

[cTnko]

Hi, i was wondering how you guys update your windows mining rig when it comes to the "big" updates (in this case the falls creator update).
While my machine is rock stable and has been for months, since the falls creator update became available, i wasn't able to upgrade to it, every time windows wants to install it, after rebooting it fails.
I thought i would install a fresh copy of windows then when i have some time, only to find out i am not even able to properly boot the windows installer from an usb stick (Windows starts loading from there and after while gets stuck in a black screen).

Is there some preferred method that you guys use to update your rig?
I am pretty sure i could get this going by disconnecting 7 out of 8 gpus and disabling the 4g decoding in bios, but as you can imagine this is quite of an PITA to do and i would like to avoid that if possible.

Any insights/recommendations are welcome.

[Plant Power]

I didn't see any difference in performance from the windows update.  Security is an issue but I've installed tiny firewall to stop updates and / or any other traffic from getting in and out of my rigs.  I set it to learn my miner and then turn it to lock everything else down.  Just a note - tiny firewall shouldn't be installed remotely as when you run the installer it'll shut every connection including your remote.

My rigs all updated last year, and the new update is set to automatically share updates to machines nearby which used my bandwidth  thus I went for the firewall and locked it all down.

Do you really need the update?  If it's security maybe lock it down with a firewall?  Sounds like a lot of work to get it to update and possible down time 

[Vann]

I just use the Microsoft media creation tool to create a bootable flash drive with the latest build and always nuke the system drive to do a clean install. The media creation tool automatically creats a bootable flash drive with the latest Windows 10 build and updates.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/15088/windows-create-installation-media

https://www.techspot.com/downloads/6734-windows-10-installation-tool.html

Then I unplug all the x1 riser connectors except for the one in the primary x16 slot. The only change I make in the Bios is to make sure to boot off of the UEFI installation partion on the flash drive. After Windows installs I run DDU in safe mode to remove the existing driver and set Windows to not automatically install drivers. Then I shutdown, connect all the risers back in the PCI-E slots and install the latest driver. I also set a group policy to disable driver updates from Windows Updates.

In the Windows 10 Pro Group Policy Editor you can keep Windows Update from updating the the drivers.

gpedit ==> Computer Configuration ==> Administrative Templates ==> Windows Components ==> Windows Update and set 'Do not include drivers with Windows Update' to enabled.

[cTnko]

Thanks guys, i am going to try to update the rig today in a way that @Vann described, as i usually also run other stuff on the rig, so a simple firewall wouldn't do it for me (but nice idea though)!

I am guessing this would have to be done on every major update, since the windows 10 updater/installer doesn't want to work correctly with this many GPUs, i should probably start looking into some linux alternatives, as this will become a huge PITA really quickly.

Ill report back when the upgrade is done, thanks again guys!

[cTnko]

So, i disconnected the risers for 7 out of 8 cards which allowed windows to update it self without the need of fresh reinstall, after it came back online i had to plug in the extra cards in one by one (add one, let it install the drivers, shut down, add another and so on).

Everything is working now 

The "Meltdown" security patch did lower the mining performance by 1.23% on Intel G4400 so not too bad.