Windows 10: Hard drive partition requirements for get windows 10 ?

On my laptop I have 3 primary partitions only, ( no small 100m partition windows typical installs use ). I have had Windows 10 in a hidden folder for a while now, but have postponed the update until now. When starting the upgrade process Window is just stuck "Working on it" and also shows a fail on update site. When launching setup in the hidden folder it cannot find a boot.wim file or similar name. Anyway that got me thinking that my partitioning is affecting this "Get Windows 10" upgrade.

Any ideas on this ?

I can reinstall Win 7 / activate / Get 10 again, however a shorter approach would be better.

:)

 

Required Drive Partition Missing

A few months ago a bought a laptop with Windows 8 preloaded. After purchase I upgraded to Windows 10.

The laptop came with a 1 TB hard drive partitioned into two sections (372GB and 542 GB). I am trying to install a new solid state 500 GB hard drive.

I made a recovery disk using the windows 10 feature and saved it onto a USB drive.

When I swapped the hard drives and tried to load windows from the USB I get an error message "Unable to reset your PC. A Required Drive Partition Missing". What can I do?

 

Windows 10 on a dual boot system

Follow-up summary:

My primary boot drive (500Gb) is partitioned and set up with Windows 7 64 bit (default boot) on one partition and Windows Vista 32 bit on the other. The Windows 7 partition has the "Get Windows 10" icon in the notification area.

My second hard drive (250Gb) is partitioned with Windows 7 64 bit on one partition. This partition
also has the "Get Windows 10" icon in the notification area. The other partition is for data storage only, and does not have a bootable operating system.

The startup Windows Boot Manager currently shows three options:

Windows 7 -> (on my second hard drive)

Windows 7 -> (on my primary hard drive, default boot)

Windows Vista -> (on my primary hard drive)

I do not have to go into BOIS to change any hard drive boot options, as this is taken care of by the Windows Boot Manager. When the time comes, I will attempt the Windows 10 free upgrade on the second hard drive, and NOT on my primary hard drive.

If this does not work, I will skip the Windows 10 free upgrade altogether. The information pages state that Windows 10 is not backward-compatible with some of my existing software. Losing functionality is not, in my mind, much of an upgrade.

 

Backup your important files /reinstall win 7 /activate /upgrade to win 10 from bootable USB or DVD . It will automatically activate with no product key . Then and only then you can clean install windows 10 ( again no product key is required as your activated up and running windows 7 was your qualifying OS)

 

Thanks for the response, you did not mention anything about the partition aspect. Win 7 is running fine on the machine right now. Can I do the upgrade via DVD on current setup and let the installer figure out its partition needs. I have already downloaded the iso. It would save time from the reinstall activate 7 method.

 

FYI, I had a Win7 machine that did not have the System Reserved partition because I had migrated the boot stuff into the OS partition. When I tried to run the Win10 upgrade, it would not run. I tried it through Windows Update and using a Win10 DVD I burned from their ISO download -- and it failed the same way both times. It also failed on another Win7 PC that came with the default System Reserved partition.

I've read that the Win10 Upgrade requires a 350MB System Reserved partition to work. Why it's not smart enough to either (1) create one (if one does not exist) or (2) resize an existing one -- is beyond me.

 

Below are the partitions I found on a few machines that I have successfully upgraded to Windows 10. It seems to me that the upgrade will resize or create the partition by itself.

2 DIY Desktops, System Reserved 350M (resized from 100M), Recovery Partition 450M (Hidden partition and newly created).

Lenovo T61, System Reserved 100M (size unchanged), Recovery Partition 450M (Hidden partition and newly created).

HP Pavilion dm4, System Reserved 199M (resized from 100M but not 100% sure), Recovery Partition 18.8G (Non-hidden, probably same as before for holding factory recovery image).

Samsung RC-510, System Reserved 100M (size unchanged), Recovery Partition 450M (Hidden partition and newly created). With Win 7 before the upgrade, HDD has 100M System Reserved, C: and D:. After upgrade, it becomes 100M System Reserved, C:, 450M (Recovery Partition) and D:

I have no idea why the System Reserved partition is different among the various machines.

 

The partition issues your having is out of my depth, hopefully some of the more experienced users will see this and keep you right .

Good luck

 

The Windows Installer will only setup partitions on clean installs otherwise it respects what you already have.

 

Sorry, NOT true. Mine was an Upgrade and the installer did create a new partition and resized the existing partitions -- as part of the installation. Perhaps when it's done, and the upgrade is done, it removes the partition(s) it created for the install, but mine failed and I had no post-install state.

 

Thanks for all the details. Wish I could say I feel better now, but I don't . I was hoping the upgrade failure was due to the System Reserved partition being too small.

 

Although I have done nothing yet on the note book I evaluated this on another machine at home. No issue with an upgrade from disk with no system reserve partition. Have not messed with this machine yet other than right now windows update wants to install now.