win10 upgrade insists on completing win8.1 updates, which fail

I bought a cheap Acer Aspire computer from Wally World that has Windows 8.1 on it.

I had to have something for internet access while I was rebuilding an XP box.

I figured that I'd do the free Windows 10 upgrade on the Acer once I had

__everything working on the XP box.

I have tried 3 different ways of doing the Win10 upgrade, and all 3 spend

__HOURS downloading Win10 and then insist on checking for Win8.1

__updates and installing them before upgrading to Win10, again taking

__HOURS in the process.

In all 3 cases, many hours are spent downloading all the updates, and then

__the updates start installing. The progress bar gets to 30%, then a restart occurs.

Then I'm told that the updates are being worked on and the progress bar gets to 98%,

__every time.

Then I'm told that the updates have failed and many hours are spent putting

__everything back the way it was.

I ran sfc /scannow which failed to repair 1/2 dozen files.

My only saving grace is that I bought a spare 500G hard drive and used MacriumReflect

__to clone the original drive from Wally World over on to it so that at any time I can

__repeat that process to get my "original" drive back onto the "cloned over" drive.

(Obviously, I don't actually touch anything on the original drive except having put Avast AV

__on it, plus Firefox, and MacriumReflect, and using the McAfee uninstaller, which I did before the first cloning).

I need to do an upgrade because the UEFI contents on this drive are uniquely matched

__to the mother board. I don't think that a scratch install of WIN10 will have all the drivers,

__proprietary files, etc. that this motherboard is going to look for.

By the way, while I'm trying to do all this, the only things connected to the computer are a

__cable connection to the router, a monitor, a USB mouse, and a USB keyboard.

I also turn off file and network protection in Avast (indefinately, since it's taking so many

__hours for all the shenanigans that Windows insists on doing).

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to install the Win8.1 updates?

I could take the time to install them one at a time, but I can't find an inclusive list that

__tells what order to do them in.

A lot of them are security updates for Windows 8.1 and the various NET frameworks from

__ 2.0 to 4.5.

Thanks

Personally, because you have a backup drive, I would clean install Windows 10 to the new drive. You can download the Windows 10 Media Creation Tool . You can pull the key with produkey and use it during the Windows 10 install.

You most likely will not need many drivers after the install. If you do then check your Aspire's website for Windows 10 specific drivers. 

What is the model number of the Aspire?

It is an XC-603G.

Since this is a UEFI installation and the boot splash screen says that BIOS and

boot files were custom designed for Acer, and because MacriumReflect shows

that there are 5 separate partitions with different formats (NTFS, FAT32, proprietary, etc,),

the custom BIOS on the motherboard is going to be counting clusters to find

entry points to the partitions.

I'm sure that if I do a "clean" install of Windows 10, it will have to "slot into"

the many partitions in exactly the same way as the native Windows 8.1.

(By the way, I've already created an ISO file with the "Media Creation Tool")

I tried the "Update this PC now" path of the creation tool and it failed at 98%

and then started undoing everything. It was one of the 3 methods that failed.

By the way, it took the creation tool 2 hours to download and verify the

Windows 10 update.

Thanks for your interest.

I have never heard of Windows boot files being customized for an OEM, only an OEM recovery partition. If you have the original drive that functions I don't see any issue doing the clean install on the new drive. Once everything is up to date then do a complete disk image of the clean install using Macrium. The only drivers I see that may need to be installed would be your Ethernet and WIreless along with Video. Windows 10 is pretty good at installing drivers during the initial install.

A clean Windows 10 install would give you a minimum of 3 partitions. The EFI system partition formatted Fat32, the Windows Reserved Partition that does not show in Disk Management, the Windows System Partition with all your Windows files, and possibly a 450MB partition used for recovery. It will not have the same partition structure as your OEM but once Windows 10 is activated and a complete disk image created with Macrium it really doesn't matter. You will actually have much cleaner partition structure vs an upgrade from Windows 8.1 to 10. See the below thread.

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/t/584864/what-are-all-these-partitions/

Edited by JohnC_21, 08 May 2016 - 09:31 AM.

Thank you for the suggestions and the link. I'll put your suggestions in motion next chance I get.

I, too, have never heard of boot files being customized for an OEM,  but this Acer Aspire is a very strange animal.

(I'm putting the following information here in case it's of interest to you but more specifically in case

anyone Googling for this information can find it).

Up until an occurrence today, when this  Win8.1 computer was booting up, the bottom left-hand corner of the

screen said "Press <Esc> to enter setup". No mention was made of the <Del> key all the way up to the

appearance of the desktop.

I tried pressing it once and that is when that sentence about the BIOS and boot files showed up along with

motherboard and software identifiers and version numbers and the hard drive and DVD identifiers.

(Since there are only 2 SATA ports on the board:  I have to remove the clone drive from the SATA0 port

and put the original in its place, and disconnect the DVD from the SATA1 port and connect the clone

drive in its place every time I want to re-clone).

Today I was exercising the cloned drive to make sure everything was OK.  I was watching "The Voice" on

Youtube when I got a BSOD, a keep-on-top message window with a text message with a phone number,

and a voice through the headphones telling me my computer had been compromised, to call the phone

number "right now" to get my computer repaired before I buy anything online.

I hit <Cntrl>-Alt-Del> and shut down the computer, since I could simply re-clone over the corrupted drive.

I did my drive swap, turned on the power and..............

Now I get the boot message "Press <Del> to enter setup".    !!!!!!

I did that and it looks like a standard BIOS configuration process.

Exited without saving, restarted, and now I get a message

"Scanning and repairing Drive D:" with a progress bar (Windows hasn't started yet)

At first I shut down the computer since I was going to over-write the drive anyway,

but when I got it to boot without the repair, MacriumReflect said there was no drive

there (even though I had seen it in that BIOS screen before I exited)!

So I rebooted again and let it scan and repair a drive that I was going to destroy

any way.

It appears to be reformatting the clone drive:  whatever it did took an hour and 45 minutes.

It stalled for a few minutes at 9% and stalled out forever when it got to 59%.

Ran MacriumReflect successfully after the scan and repair.

I now have 5 partitions with the following specs:

1)  An NTFS primary partition of 600.0MB called "Recovery" with no drive letter and 279.9MB used

2)  A   FAT32 LBA primary partition of 300.0MB called "ESP" with no drive letter and 49.5MB used.

3)  An unformatted primary partition of 128.0MB with no name and no drive letter and all 128.0MB used.

4)  An NTFS primary partition of   450.37GBytes called "Acer" with drive letter "C:" and  39.05GBytes used.

5)  An NTFS primary partition of  14.38GBytes called "Push Button Reset" with no drive letter and  13.54GBytes used.

I didn't want to be so long winded, but I put all this information here in case Google sends someone here

who needs partition information for their Acer Aspire.

Thanks for your interest and help.

The partition you will no longer have after a clean install is the last partition which is your factory reset partition. After doing a clean install you still wish to have a factory reset partition then install Aoemi One Key.

Your Esc key is in firmware and should still function after a clean install of Windows 10.

 I may've missed something in the above, but if you have a whole lot of updates to install, say more than 40, you'll get what you report.  I recently had to install 114 updates to Windows 7, so I let it install 40, then stopped & rebooted, then 40 more, repeat once more, then install the rest.   This has been a known problem for a good while (2 or 3 years maybe?) and MS has done nothing to fix it.  I guess they're too busy trying to force us all onto Windows 10!  

 Good luck.

There IS a huge list of them.

Do I just start at the top of the list and check the 1st 40?

And then uncheck those and check the next 40?

Will that install them in the proper sequence?

Thanks for the input.

 Yep, that's exactly what I had to do.  It's a bit of a pain and I wish I knew why MS hasn't fixed it, but that's what you have to do unfortunately.  I guess they don't want to fix any more than they absolutely have to because they seem to have ants in their pants to get the world converted to Windows 10.