Cargo.exe gone missing

[Murray]

When I ran “rustup update” i got these messages:

C:>rustup update
info: syncing channel updates for 'stable-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc'
info: latest update on 2025-08-07, rust version 1.89.0 (29483883e 2025-08-04)
info: downloading component 'rust-src'
info: downloading component 'cargo'
info: downloading component 'clippy'
info: downloading component 'rust-docs'
info: downloading component 'rust-std'
info: downloading component 'rustc'
75.9 MiB / 75.9 MiB (100 %) 38.4 MiB/s in 2s
info: downloading component 'rustfmt'
info: removing previous version of component 'rust-src'
info: removing previous version of component 'cargo'
info: rolling back changes
error: failure removing component 'cargo-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc', directory does not exist: 'bin\cargo.exe'
info: checking for self-update

stable-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc update failed - rustc 1.88.0 (6b00bc388 2025-06-23)

info: cleaning up downloads & tmp directories

Why has my “bin\cargo.exe” gone missing??

AFAIK Nothing has been changed by ME in my Rust environment>

BYW: I am trying to find WHERE I have used this crate: stable-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc and remove it.

Thanks

[Vorpal]

Since you are on Windows, the answer is usually antivirus. Do you use any, and can you check what it did?

[rjc2013]

stable-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc isn’t a crate, it’s the variation of the compiler you have. Like Vorpal says, errors like this are usually antivirus (if you have Bitdefender, that’s especially bad).

If your Rust install is now broken, the “nuke it from orbit” option is to delete your .rustup and .cargo directories, and then run rustup-init.exe again. Be aware that you will lose all your cached crates, and cargo will have to download them again, if you do this.