Windows 10: Problems upgrading old laptop from 1607 to 1703

One more thing... my Acer has a button for Wi-Fi and I found last time that when it stalled, that if I pressed the button I could significantly speed things up to complete the install. You could see it on the spinning dots. Press the button and they speeded up, press again and they slowed down.

That happened with the Creators Update, I can't recall noticing that behaviour with the earlier versions.

 

I've made some progress today. The Tweaking.com Repair tool (I couldn't find a 'Cautious Repair' tool?) didn't seem to help much, and if anything left things more broken. It had a lot of error messages.

However I had some success with using Shift-F10 in the circling dots after a clean install to get a command line and then use Device Manager to try to install different drivers and disabling them. It was clear in this mode that I couldn't easily disable the WiFi or Ethernet drivers - any attempt to do this caused Device Manager to hang on both drivers.

Through some combination of running a driver installer for the WiFi drivers, and trying to disable the wired ethernet driver (Broadcom 440X 10/100) in Device Manager, I managed to disable the wired ethernet driver. Then lean on the power button to force a shutdown (the shutdown command didn't work) and then reboot, and it started Windows 10 and got to an OOBE screen.

If I enable the ethernet driver again, it causes problems and I can't then disable it. Both the ethernet and Wifi drivers seem to be built-in to the Windows 10 install image - I don't seem able to remove them with DISM, and I suspect it's their interaction with some new 1703 feature that's the issue.

This means I have a running machine but I can't use the ethernet cable.

Windows already seems to be using a more recent driver then latest one I can find on Broadcom's site, although I still wish I knew how to remove the driver it's using and go back to the Broadcom one?
If I use Uninstall Device in Device manager, then Windows automatically reinstalls it and (what's worse) re-enables it, which jams up the entire system (and I don't know how to escape that situation - Windows only works if this driver is disabled).

Edit: I forgot to mention - I checked the setup error log, but couldn't see anything obviously wrong. I believe that Setup thinks all is working well and all the drivers are good. Device manager thinks they are good drivers too - however I think they are mistaken!

 

That tends to suggest you have more things wrong than just a driver.

I would guess the error messages might offer useful information. They are there to tell you something.

(cautious - that's just my adjective - it's cautious 'cos of all the preparatory steps that give you ways of reversing any changes)

 

It sounds like you have a lot going on there.

If you have a driver somewhere then have you tried the 'have disc' method in device manager to force it onto your system.

Again just going from memory, try disable rather than uninstall and again try and install the driver from that state either by using the drivers self installer or by the 'have disc' method. I know how painful a job this is on my Acer. Around 15 minutes to 90% complete the install and 6 or 7 hours to get to the state of having a workable driver installed.

 

I went onto the Feedback Hub last night to try to report the issue, and noticed other people with that Broadcom 440X driver having the same issues. For instance someone with a Dell was getting the same issue and using the Broadcom driver in 1703 was disabling their WiFi too.

So it seems to be a more widespread issue with 1703 and that Broadcom 440X driver, which I think it needs a fix from Broadcom (last driver version seems to be from January 2007 so not holding my breath) or Microsoft. As the driver has been stable for the last 10 years I'd suggest Microsoft have broken something and they should fix it.

With that Repair tool, I did the decidedly un-cautious (incautious?) approach of letting it boot into Safe mode, ticking all the repair options and leaving it running. It completed most of the tests with various messages flashing up and then crashed out with an error message saying the software has stopped working altogether.

But Windows itself seems to be running OK so far, and as it's a clean install, I haven't found much else wrong with it.

Having clean installed again and used the command line to disable the Broadcom driver, it is in a working state and seems OK apart from that driver being disabled. I'm going to reinstall my apps and do a Macrium image before doing anything with that driver again. I may try the "Have Disc"option as suggested but as I've made some progress, I want a good backup in place first before I break it again.

 

Now I figured out it's the Broadcom 440x driver, I've been able to find this thread:
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...3-a64b92445385

So it looks like Microsoft are onto it. *Thumbs

I'm going to mark as Solved, as Microsoft are on the case and I suspect there's nothing we can do here until they fix it. I'm guessing any version of that Broadcom driver I find will have the same problem so I'm not going to try other drivers at this stage.

 

That's interesting reading (the link as well).

(Yes, make a backup *Smile I'm having fun and games at the moment with Creators Update and Edge and not being able to access certain sites quickly... very long story, it could be a WiFi driver issue and/or a router incompatibility)

That MS are on the case is good, and as yours seems to be a widely reported issue then its likely a fix may get pushed out. I reported the Acer/Atheros issue many times when testing W10 in the early days but it never got fixed.

Good luck... and thanks for the rep.

 

I have an acer travelmate 2423 (XP era) that cannot upgrade since 1511, cannot clean install using the standard setup, but can run more recent Windows 10 builds from USB HDDs created on other machines, or can be installed using DISM or IMAGEX to apply the image to the drive.

I see it this way - The WinPE during setup uses limited graphics and during the first part of setup tries to use networking to update drivers, so whatever interrupts WinPE is using to drive graphics and network devices are not available to the Windows 10 under installation, so they are set to share interrupts with other devices, worse, the drivers are generic Microsoft ones. These very cut-back laptop BIOSes are likely to be very old, and not very good on the plug'n'play front, especially dealing with not very flexible hardware, ill-fitting device drivers and, increasing demand for memory being given to graphics in Windows 10.

Windows 8 PE set aside 256MB for Video memory, Windows 10PE dedicates 1GB of Video memory.

When you get to the OOBE phase of setup, WinPE has finished and the new Windows installation is in charge of finishing the setup process, but devices are conflicting, system interrupts are using a lot of processor cycles, and everything slows up as the processors, that is both the GPU and CPU, often on the same chip die get hot through running excessive cycles and may get throttled back, slowing everything down until errors cannot be handled and the setup fails.

Instead of stopping dead, and leaving all the evidence on disk, Setup neatly rolls back to the previous build, wiping out all evidence of the failure.

These failures are not being reported by telemetry ('cos your laptop's network's broken), and your old laptops certainly are not on the test benches at the development labs at Redmond.

So one way may be to try a proxy machine to do the upgrade - take the disk out of the laptop, get it running in a desktop and perform the upgrade there, then return it to the laptop, and let it find all the old drivers that way. This may not be so easy if the laptop has a 2.5" IDE drive, unlikely to have an adapter for that size disk, and you can't upgrade on a USB connected drive. You could clone the laptop system, upgrade it and clone it back.

If you can't upgrade that way, a clean install is next, but like mine, it may not be possible using the standard setup disk or USB, so apply the image to a clean partition with Dism or Imagex, and boot with bcdboot. Then let windows sort out the drivers and their memory allocation during the first part of the OOBE - since no WinPE is running, there is no conflicting demand on the devices or resources.

 

Yeah that had occurred to me too.
I guess Microsoft could look at the telemetry and notice that x% of laptops running 1607 were connecting using a particular network card and 0% are connecting with that hardware and 1703 though, and perhaps draw a conclusion from that?

 

In the normal course of things, telemetry happens after the event - like when the BSOD collects a load of data to phone home before restarting your machine. In theory, the rollback should be bundling together a load of stuff and should ask you if its ok to send that off home, giving you an idea of how many hundred MB it will be sending back, and you should typically ok it, or cancel it and get back to work.

It does not have to send it there and then - at your convenience would be best.

There's little evidence that such a thing is taking place, and certainly nothing to alert the user that the event has been noted.

Any thoughts on the proxy upgrade I mentioned?

 

Yeah I had thought about deploying the WIM image using WinPE.

However, one of the problems is that the problem driver is already baked into the ISO, and I couldn't figure out how to remove it from the WIM file? (DISM lets me remove 3rd party drivers but not the default drivers like this one.) So I think when it started up I'd still have the problem, however I deployed it.

At present I have a working machine (with Ethernet disabled) so in the short term I'll leave it and see if Microsoft come up with a fix - and given they've said they're working on one, I'm quite hopeful.

 

By proxy, I mean performing the upgrade with your laptop hard drive (or a clone of it) on a totally different machine - one that has no driver issues. The driverstore on the disk will have your "happily running "1607 drivers in it untouched, and the drivers for the proxy machine will be perhaps updated by Windows setup, but there's no reason to update your laptop drivers. Even here there is no need for an internet link to complete the upgrade.

Then you restore your updated laptop drive, or the updated clone of it to your laptop. Allow the "getting devices ready" and "getting ready" until "lets start" without any internet access, no ethernet and no Wifi - turn off the router for a while if need be. You should be running 1703 with all your old drivers.

 

Ah I see. So I could do the upgrade on a VM for instance?
(Using the Macrium image, converting to a VHD and running the VHD in a VM, probably with no network access.)

For now I've spent enough time on it in the last week or two, so I'm going to leave it and see what Microsoft come up with, but I'll keep that approach up my sleeve for future use.
It's not like I only have one XP era laptop... *Redface

 

Yes David, a VM would be fine. It should have no trouble upgrading. It should lose activation while in the VM, then reactivate back on the laptop.

I shall try this approach with my Travelmate in the next day or two, and report back.