Well I’ve been waiting literally months for a laptop to complete its claim to be “installing” update 1709, and it never does.
The only feedback in the entire update process is a little spinning circle in a list of updates, which spins for hours on end without apparently doing anything until Windows suddenly out of the blue is “ready” to install and reboots. It will appear to get somewhere, reboot again, and somehow return to the desktop as if everything is OK, yet the update list claims that the update failed. Then it spins again.
I mean, even if it’s “good” that it doesn’t auto-install broken updates, it sure seems to be spending the absolute maximum amount of resources in terms of downloading data, consuming energy, wasting my time, etc. I suspect the size of the update is the factor they should most easily be able to control; patch something smaller and maybe it will actually finish. I don’t know, just seems like an utter mess to me.
You probably have the same problem I had, which is a slightly non-standard disk layout. Windows Update will fail without producing any meaningful diagnostics. It took me a lot of time and much effort to finally get past that and get my system working.
Things to check:
Are you UEFI booting an MBR disk? It works, but Windows Setup will fail in future upgrades.
Do you have all the correct and required partitions? If you don't have the right partitions (OEM, EFI) of the right size, Windows Setup will again fail with cryptic errors, none of which say "your partitions are wrong".
> Do you have all the correct and required partitions? If you don't have the right partitions (OEM, EFI) of the right size, Windows Setup will again fail with cryptic errors, none of which say "your partitions are wrong".
Worth pointing out you don't have to be sharing the drive with another OS to get this situation. I had a system which I upgraded from 7 -> 8.1 -> 10. My linux install and bootloader are on a totally separate drive. This left the drive with:
* 100mb system reserved partition (unused, created by win 7 installer)
* 250gb C: partition
* 400mb system reserved partition (created by 8.1 or 10 update, actually used)
Then I used the Samsung tool to copy to my new ssd and ended up with a 100mb system reserved partition and a 1tb c: drive. But the 1709 update tried to unpack the >100mb update into the too small system reserved partition and failed in a loop
Sure. My system disk was Windows only, but I go to pretty extreme lengths to avoid reinstalling Windows. So after my latest system upgrade I had a UEFI system running off a MBR disk and some bad partitioning. This was a source for much amusement...Window Setup would fail without explaining why, mbr2gpt would fail without explaining why, the BCD tools behaved badly, the Windows 10 recovery environment wouldn't work, etc.
Gradually, with much trial and error, I managed to work through each problem, until I wound up with a mostly correct GPT disk and a fully functioning system. It's now successfully applied several updates correctly, where previously it would get to 99%, fail, then roll back, only to try again the next day. As a side effect, I now know more about Windows 10 booting, the BCD, and GPT than I ever wanted to.
The only "problem" I have now is an unused old boot partition that I'm frankly terrified to try to remove, since it'll renumber all of the partitions and cause some problems. I'm relatively sure I know how to fix it, but it's too risky to contemplate right now.
Do you have a copy of unsupported software hidden in a sub folder anywhere on your local drives?
Client of mine had an old copy of the Novell client installer (it was never installed on this machine) sitting in a folder named C:\Old_Computer\ . Last year's fall update kept aborting with an unclear error dialog. The install log only gave a vague suggestion that the issues was unsupported software and DID NOT reveal the full path to the offending file, just the title of the software.
Windows desperately needs a shibboleet option, so power users can stop fighting it.
I was able to get the upgrade to finally work after I uninstalled the DisplayLink driver and a Splashtop app (for using an Android device as an additional monitor) and then it finally worked. I don't know which of the two (or both) were the exact culprit, but it was driving me bonkers trying to get that update to work.
For one of my clients, HP had a drive encryption program I had to uninstall for the update to finally go. Drives had never been encrypted, HP was just running it in the background from the start.
The only feedback in the entire update process is a little spinning circle in a list of updates, which spins for hours on end without apparently doing anything until Windows suddenly out of the blue is “ready” to install and reboots. It will appear to get somewhere, reboot again, and somehow return to the desktop as if everything is OK, yet the update list claims that the update failed. Then it spins again.
I mean, even if it’s “good” that it doesn’t auto-install broken updates, it sure seems to be spending the absolute maximum amount of resources in terms of downloading data, consuming energy, wasting my time, etc. I suspect the size of the update is the factor they should most easily be able to control; patch something smaller and maybe it will actually finish. I don’t know, just seems like an utter mess to me.