Can I safely cancel a windows update mid download without damaging PC?

To clarify, I just wanted to reinstall some audio drivers through Windows, and as I was doing that It seems I chose both the audio software components AND Windows 11 by accident.. By the time I realized my error I was already at two percent download and had to restart my machine to install said audio drivers.

After restarting my computer, I decided to try to kill the entire download process by stopping the Windows Update service through service.msc, it seemed to do the trick. However, I'm concerned that I might've ended up corrupting my Windows install or something by doing this. This was done specifically while it was still in the download progress and before reaching the blue screen install phase.

Can anyone answer my query?

The only thing that you did was stop the download process. Always keep the machine backed up and stuff like documents, photos and other idata that you want to keep mirrored on a Cloud service and physical media.

bro67 said:

The only thing that you did was stop the download process. Always keep the machine backed up and stuff like documents, photos and other idata that you want to keep mirrored on a Cloud service and physical media.

So I should be safe, right?

Arcturus Fyr said:

So I should be safe, right?

yes windows update downloads the updates first so if you were only on 2% then it never actually applied those updates.

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if you are concerned just run SFC it will validate the crucial files in your FS

Megahertz said:

I would say that, soon or later, windows update will continue the Win 11 download and install it.
Did you run disk cleanup to clean the drive?

No not yet, didn't know that I needed to.

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And to everyone else, thank you very much. Huge stress relief to find out that I didn't bork my machine.