Windows 10: Can't update Windows from USB drive

I have an old Microsoft Surface 3 that has been sitting around on a shelf for many months and decided to dust it off to update it to current Windows & app versions, but was unable to connect to the internet (I started a thread in the Networking section) so thought I'd update the existing Win10 Home v.1709 to v.1903 to see if that fixed things.

I inserted a USB stick that I created from a downloaded version of v.1903 that I've used to successfully update three other computers by launching setup.exe. When I tried that on the Surface 3, a little bit into the process I got:





Odd, I thought, so I thought I'd try by booting to the USB and reached:





So, other than wiping the hard drive and doing a clean install of v.1903, is there any way to do an in-place upgrade. Normally I'd let Windows Update do its thing, but I can't access the internet...

:)

 

help. USB drive isn't assigned a drive letter.

Any usb flash drive I plug into my computer isn't assigned a drive letter. The physical drive shows in the "safely remove hardware" but it doesnt show up in disk management. I have tried to populate the volume thru the safely remove hardware properties window and it does pop up in the list but it doesn't stay there. This isn't a format or assign a letter problem. It's more complicated then that. Maybe one of the services needed for usb drive management was disabled? Suggestions needed. btw external usb harddrives work fine.

 

Installing windows off of a USB stick

Step By Step from vista:
From admin cmd prompt

1. diskpart
1a. list disk
2. select disk 1 (replace 1 with your usb drive)
3. clean
4. create partition primary
5. select partition 1 (replace 1 with your usb drive)
6. active
7. format fs=fat32
8. assign
9. exit

Copy Windows Vista's DVD ROM content to the Flash Drive

xcopy d:\*.* /s/e/f e:\ (d being your vista cd and e being your usb stick)

And that's it, boot off your usb disk

 

USB boot for bios update

Did the first step. It already doesn't work. Note the capacities and drive letters M:/N: The HP utility is about to format my raid-1 volume containing my 2 750gb drives. It thinks it's the usb stick. I can not select any other drives in the HP utility. My 512mb usb stick is U:.

Any other suggestions?