potatoqualitee / kbupdate

🛡 KB Viewer, Saver, Installer and Uninstaller
MIT License
326 stars 48 forks source link

KBs that are no longer listed in the catalog but still downloadable #231

Open mjmeans opened 4 months ago

mjmeans commented 4 months ago

Some KBs that used to be published are now hidden in that if you search for them on catalog.update.mocroosft.com, there are no results. Some of the KBs are simply gone with no references found except for some Microsoft help forum posts. While others are still documented as EXPIRED updates but the links to download them can't be found when searching in the catalog.

When repairing a Windows image with DISM it will download KBs installed and identified on the system. Windows uses the SoftwareDistribution folder if it's available and if not broken. However, DISM, when not using the /LimitAccess switch, downloads any missing packages. I don't know how DISM knows how to download these otherwise hidden KBs.

One example is KB4503294. The web site here documents the update. Yet the catalog doesn't find it.

However, the original links can be discovered using the Internet Wayback Machine and other sources and actually are still hosted by Microsoft servers:

Get-KbUpdate doesn't find this update either.

In my case, I need them to do a system repair, and tracked down several of the original links the hard way. I know Install-KbUpdate can use the -FilePath switch if I manually downloaded the update. But is there a way Get-KbUpdate can find these 'hidden' updates, or maybe a way to add them to the kbupdate-library?