Saturday, August 29, 2015

Windows 10 Upgrade Install Failing With A PRE_OS Error (Something Happened)

I have seen other guides that say to fix a failed Windows 10 install by doing a clean boot among other things:

  • disabling items in MSCONFIG
  • run setup.exe as administrator
  • ensure that a bunch of services are set to automatic and start them
  • disabled all antivirus
  • boot into safe mode and run delete both folders that start with $Windows at the root of the C: Drive
  • change your locale settings.
  • remove all previous files, settings, and applications
  • Create a registry key called AllowOSUpgrade to 1
I tried all of these at the same time, and none of them worked. The upgrade to Windows 10 kept failing and it would not give any reason why other than an inexplicable error message. I did two things after this: I installed Windows 7 Service Pack 1, which was not installed before. Still no dice. So I imaged the drive to another drive, and lo and behold, Acronis True Image found some unreadable sectors. I set it to ignore read errors while cloning, then booted up into 7 and Windows 10 installed just fine!

People are also saying to do a clean install of 7 or 8 first, or run chkdsk, which could be the reason that the upgrade then proceeds, if the hard drive errors are correctable!

Hey Apple, will you be giving away OS X version 11 away for free? (Or OS XI or OS 11 or OS 10.11?)

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