Microsoft formally removes a command line tool from Windows 11 25H2, 24H2, 23H2, Windows 10

Microsoft has removed Support and Recovery Assistant (SaRA) and has issued guidance on what to do next.

Back in 2023, Microsoft announced the death of MSDT, or Microsoft Support Diagnostic Tool, which was a legacy troubleshooting feature on Windows. Fast forward three years, the company is doing the same thing again for another troubleshooting and diagnostic Windows feature called Microsoft Support and Recovery Assistant, or SaRA in short, and the reason is the same, to boost Windows security.

The company has announced this in a new support article on its official website. Microsoft writes: "The SaRA command-line utility is deprecated to help secure and harden your environment. ... Microsoft has officially removed the SaRA utility from all in-support versions of Windows updates released on and after March 10, 2026."

Thus, SaRA will be removed from Windows 11 versions 25H2, 24H2, and 23H2, as well as Windows 10 22H2. On Server versions, Windows Server 2025, 2022, and older are affected.

Users online had already noticed that this change was in motion nearly one and a half years ago as SaRA would fail to launch.

Similar to MSDT, Microsoft has urged users to move on to Get Help and use its command line features to troubleshoot and diagnose issues, as it writes "the Get Help command-line tool has similar capabilities and is recommended as a replacement for the SaRA utility."

SaRA, for those who are not familiar, is a command-line tool designed to troubleshoot and resolve issues with Microsoft 365, Office, Outlook, and Windows. It works by running automated tests to identify the root cause of problems and then suggests or applies appropriate fixes. SaRA helps users by automatically fixing common issues such as installation failures, activation errors, and connectivity problems. It could also collect diagnostic information, guide users through manual solutions, or recommend next steps. Hence it was made to simplify troubleshooting, reduce downtime, and improve productivity by providing guided and automated problem resolution for Microsoft apps on Windows.

For anyone wondering, Microsoft has confirmed that SaRA scripts can't be reused as they have been migrated to GetHelpCmdLine. So the scripts no longer work in the SaRACmdLine environment, even though the core functionality remains the same, with the main difference being the infrastructure upgrade that makes GetHelpCmdLine more secure. So all the scenarios supported in the SaRACmdLine tool will work the same in GetHelpCmdLine too.

You can find the new support article from Microsoft here under KB5086902 and more details on the command line version of Get Help here on Microsoft's official website.

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Posted Wednesday 1 April 2026 at 6:18 am AEST (my time).

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