Microsoft KB4056892 Meltdown/Spectre patch bricks AMD Athlon-powered machines

Many users claim the Security Update for Windows KB4056892, the Microsoft Meltdown/Spectre patch, bricks AMD Athlon-powered machines.

Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities will continue to create a lot of problems to users and chip vendors.

As you know, tech giants like Apple, Cisco and Microsoft admitted the problem for their products and started rolling out security patched.

While many experts argued that the fixes will have a significant impact on the performance of any devices, Intel confirmed that extensive testing conducted by tech giants (Apple, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft) to assess any impact on system performance from security updates did not reveal negative effects.

Unfortunately, the problems seem not ended, the fix released by Microsoft for the Meltdown and Spectre attacks (Security Update for Windows KB4056892) is bricking some AMD PCs, in particular, Athlon-powered machines.

Let’s remind that AMD CPUs are not susceptible to the Meltdown attack, but are vulnerable only to Spectre attacks.

In this thread on answers.microsoft.com, many users claim that the Security Update for Windows KB4056892 bricks some AMD-powered PCs and leaves them displaying with the Windows startup logo.

“I have older AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+, Asus MB, after installation of KB4056892 the system doesn’t boot, it only shows the Windows logo without animation and nothing more. After several failed boots it do roll-back then it shows error 0x800f0845. Unfortunately, it seems it’s not easy to disable the automatic updates without gpedit tweaks, so it tries installing and rolling-back the update over and over. ” reported an angry user.

Athlon-powered systems just after the installation of the patch stopped working, and the worst news is that the fix doesn’t create a recovery point, and rollback is some cases not accessible.

Some users reported that even re-installing Windows 10 doesn’t solve the problem.

Affected users will need to disable Windows Update, but only Microsoft can solve the embarrassing situation for its AMD users.

At the time, the thread did not include any response from Microsoft.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs –  Microsoft KB4056892,  Meltdown/Spectre patch)

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