Monday, August 1, 2016

Windows 10 Upgrade - Synopsis

Synopsis

There are (were?) 4 tools from Microsoft for that Windows 10 upgrade.
  -Get Windows 10 (GWX)
  -Windows Upgrade Assistant (UA)
  -MediaBuilder (MB)
  -and a 4th one that GWX would invoke and which utilized a portion of Windows Update customized for the Windows 10 download.  Only saw it on Friday 7/29 twice.

In the beginning months, GWX would work pretty good; it would download the OS file, and then when desired install the OS.  We did many upgrades using that tool.

During the last week, GWX began not to be able to install the OS.  So we utilized the UA quite a bit.  It was nice in that it gave percentage of completion.  However in the last few days, it started failing on about 25% of units (more as time went on).  The major problem seen was that it would stall in the 90+% completion of the INSTALLATION (not download) sometimes even at 99%.  In one case it did finish at 8 hours, in other cases, after 5 hours, we pulled the plug on it.  The best workaround found was to disable the Windows 7 updates (set to Never check), and then run UA again.  This worked 100% after we had the stall outs.  The bad news was that UA would download the OS files all over again, but on fast internet connections that was only 20 minutes.  Interesting that during early successful UA installs, if GWX had previously downloaded the OS, then UA would see that and just start the installation.

Failures, we saw 3 failed installations.  Two were re-attempted with Windows 7 update set to Never and then ran UA, and they completed.  The last bugger was a pre-install check failure due to CPU not compatible…that is that supposedly the Core i3 didn’t support an extended instruction set (NX).  Third-party cpu tests showed it was functional and supported.  We tried all the suggested fixes of BIOS Settings, several bcdedits to no avail, and finally we used a technique several people reported success with: use the MediaBuilder and choose the “Update this pc” option.  It had a brief system check and then an update section and than an installation which did in fact work.

Never tried – install from disk (media), though we did make them and had them ready.

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