Hello, and welcome to Sysnative!
It's great to have a new face here :) I also want to say thank you for giving such a clear and concise explanation of what's going on and what you've already tried. That saves me a lot of time so I'm very grateful :)
Onto your issue. ERROR_FAIL_REBOOT_REQUIRED [specific root failure from your logfiles of STATUS_RM_NOT_ACTIVE] can have quite a few causes, but only a couple are common. We therefore target the common ones first and if that doesn't do it we move onto the less common ones.
First, I want you to click on Start, type in
services.msc, right click on it > Run as Administrator. Scroll down to
Windows Modules Installer and double click on it. If the service is stopped, click Start [this doesn't actually affect anything really, I'm just checking that the service is able to start and not completely broken - let me know if won't start or doesn't exist in the list at all]. Then change the startup type to Automatic (if it's not already at that), click OK, and restart your computer. During the restart the startup type should automatically revert to Manual but any pended restart operations will be performed. Retry Windows Update and stop here if everything's back to normal. Otherwise proceed onto the next step.
Explanation of why we're doing this: [I said earlier that this error has many causes. For the sake of simplicity I shall assume that you have one of the common causes. Some of the things I write may not be strictly accurate for some of the rarer causes, but we'll come to them only if needs be]. This problem is usually caused because of pended transaction events. When Windows Update pends something for installation over a reboot, amongst many other things some transactions are created. These are basically little operations - move this file, create this registry key, to be performed over the reboot in such a way that they can be rolled back if needs be. If you get transaction events stuck in the pending queue - and never leaving - Windows Update will repeatedly ask for a restart in order to clear them out. The Windows Modules Installer service helps clear out the transactions. By setting it to Automatic it gets started on the next reboot and clears out the queue. It then gets set back to Manual (won't run on reboot) so that it doesn't run every time it's not needed (Windows Updates usually only come out once a month - why run it every day when we don't need to?). But if the transaction queue gets set - and the service state gets stuck in Manual, the queue never gets cleared --> your problem. Hence we set it to Automatic for one reboot cycle to check on this.
The above is not very common though. Usually we actually get a ghost transaction causing a problem: some corrupted pended transaction which can't be processed, can't be removed from the queue, can't be properly detected, but still detected enough to upset Windows Update. To solve this we clear out all non-corrupt transactions (above) then completely reset all transaction queues. This should get rid of any ghost entries. Let's try it.
After you've set the service startup type once, restarted, and confirmed Windows Update is still not working, do the following:
WARNING to other readers: These fixes absolutely must not be run on a computer which is not experiencing the problem at hand. In particular, these fixes will cause great damage to a computer whose Windows Update is working normally - these techniques are not to be used to attempt to cancel an inconvenient restart, only when Windows Update is repeatedly forcing a restart.
First, start an Elevated Command Prompt:
https://www.sysnative.com/forums/wi...-prompt-window-windows-windows-vista-7-a.html
and copy and paste in the following:
fsutil resource setautoreset true %SystemDrive%\
attrib -r -s -h %SystemRoot%\System32\Config\TxR\*
del %SystemRoot%\System32\Config\TxR\*
attrib -r -s -h %SystemRoot%\System32\SMI\Store\Machine\*
del %SystemRoot%\System32\SMI\Store\Machine\*.tm*
del %SystemRoot%\System32\SMI\Store\Machine\*.blf
del %SystemRoot%\System32\SMI\Store\Machine\*.regtrans-ms
pressing Enter after the final line if necessary. Type
Y in any "Are you sure? (Y/N)" prompts. Do not be concerned if there are any failures with "
Could not find...{x}", as they are normal. Just ignore them.
Then restart your computer again and once again retry Windows Update. Then let me know.
Good luck!
Richard