I'm pretty sure Windows 10 bricked my Laptop

[+Asmodai MVC]

I'm not one to test pre-release versions of an OS.  I'm not in the insider program and so I waited patiently for to get my Windows 10 upgrade via Windows Update.  On Wed. night I got the notice on my primary desktop (which I don't want to go first) so I checked booted up my laptop and sure enough my update was ready there too.  At about 8pm I clicked the button and got a windowed screen with spinning dots on some message along the lines of "We're working on it." (that may not be the exact text but something like that).  So far so good?

At about midnight the same screen was still working on it... It sure would be nice if there was SOME indication of what it was working on (download, existing setup scan, whatever).  There is no "advanced" button or detail or anything... so I went to bed for the night figuring maybe it was a HUGE download (reasonable given it's an entire OS) and it's just taking forever over my 2009 era Wifi (laptop is a 2009 Sony VAIO SR series).

Thursday morning before work, same screen but I need to go to work so I just left it be.

Thursday when I got home from work, same screen.  At this point I gave up.  I just closed the window, noticed the icon on the shutdown button indicating there were updates and so rebooted.  Fortunately everything came up fine so I figured may as well try again and maybe it will just resume where it left off.  After several tries at about 11pm I FINALLY got it to tell me it was ready and ask if I wanted to go ahead and install now or schedule the upgrade for later.  Wanting to get the process going (at this point expecting it to take all night) I said install now.  It rebooted to the full screen with the circle and the percentage in the middle... from 11 to midnight it got to 2%.

This morning I got up to go to work and it was at 32%.  I checked it as soon as I got up and then went about getting ready for work.  Before I left for work I checked on it once more and it was STILL at 32% so I suspect it will be stuck there when I get home.  If it is then there's probably a good chance my OS is hosed since it was part way through an install.  At this point even if it is done it's taken over 24 hours to install which is insane!

Needless to say I'm not even going to attempt to install Win10 on my Primary desktop for some time.

 

 

[Jose_49]

Wait I don't understand something. Did the OS rolled back to your previous Windows installation?

[Astra.Xtreme]

I think "bricked" is the wrong word for it.

Maybe download the ISO and make a USB installer.  Not sure if you'll be able to boot from it and do an upgrade, but it's worth a shot.

[+Asmodai MVC]

Wait I don't understand something. Did the OS rolled back to your previous Windows installation?

I'm not sure what you're asking.  It had Windows 7, the install of Windows 10 is hung at 32% (after more than 24 hours, about 36 hours when I left for work this morning)

Nothing rolled back to anything.  MAYBE when I get home if it is indeed still at 32% as I suspect it will be then if I reboot it will "roll back" to my previous Windows installation but I'm not holding my breath.

 

[BoondockSaint]

Given it's a laptop, it probably ran into a problem with upgrading drivers or some software that is causing a conflict. Upgrades are never foolproof, it's annoying but it happens.

I have upgraded 3 machines (and after the upgrade, did a clean install), and all went smoothly. They all have a variety of hardware and didn't have any major issues.

May just be bad luck unfortunately.

[Seahorsepip Veteran]

If a windows install/upgrade takes more then 3 hours there is something going very wrong for sure O.o

[+Asmodai MVC]

I think "bricked" is the wrong word for it.

Maybe download the ISO and make a USB installer.  Not sure if you'll be able to boot from it and do an upgrade, but it's worth a shot.

Well I don't think "bricked" is a strictly technical term and it seems appropriate in this case if the install is indeed hung and the system won't reboot in it's current state.  Perhaps it isn't the best choice of words though.

As for the USB installer I could be wrong but off the top of my head I would guess that the laptop's 2009 BIOS doesn't support booting from USB.  I may be able to burn the ISO into a bootable disc and boot from the optical drive if Win10 supports that (I know the retail media is even USB now instead of disc based).  Even if that does work there is uncertainty then if it will recognize my existing Windows 7 install in it's current state.  If not it's not going to do me much good to install from a disc only to end up with an unauthorized copy of Win10.

If I have to reinstall the old OS it's going to be a colossal pain because the laptop was purchased a few months before Windows 7 came out with Windows Vista installed and the "free upgrade to Windows 7".  So that means I'm pretty sure I'd have try to find the Windows Vista media from 2009, install that, find and install the Windows 7 Upgrade from 2009, and then try again to upgrade it to Windows 10.  Each of those installs possibly taking hours (based on Windows 10 so far it could take DAYS).

This is making for an excellent first impression of Windows 10.

[Jose_49]

As for the USB installer I could be wrong but off the top of my head I would guess that the laptop's 2009 BIOS doesn't support booting from USB.  

If I have to reinstall the old OS it's going to be a colossal pain because the laptop was purchased a few months before Windows 7 came out with Windows Vista installed and the "free upgrade to Windows 7".  So that means I'm pretty sure I'd have try to find the Windows Vista media from 2009, install that, find and install the Windows 7 Upgrade from 2009, and then try again to upgrade it to Windows 10.  Each of those installs possibly taking hours (based on Windows 10 so far it could take DAYS).

This is making for an excellent first impression of Windows 10.

I have a laptop from 2008 and it supports booting from USB. 

Your Windows installation is never deleted due to this problems. I don't know if by shutting it down and starting it again it will rollback to your previous OS. But worry not, your information is not lost. At worse, you'll need to extract the Hard Drive from the laptop and load it externally in other place for doing so. 

As for the Windows 7 ugprade, you do not need to install Windows Vista. You can perfectly install windows 7 and use your upgrade key for activating your key. If that does not activate your OS, you can use the "Activate by phone" feature which will activate you. I have done this step with no problems! 

 

Now. Thinking a bit, you could try as I've said to shut down the computer and start it again. See what happens and post back. I'm almost sure that it will roll back to your previous OS.

[Xilo]

You should just be able to download the ISO and do a clean install. Clean installs are always the way to go.

[Jose_49]

You should just be able to download the ISO and do a clean install. Clean installs are always the way to go.

He first need his hardware registered with the server before doing anything at all.

[f5s4t3]

I'm pretty sure your HDD is on the fritz. And not since now and not from Windows 10.

[zhangm Supervisor]

Are you keeping your files? How full is the drive?

I upgraded a fairly old laptop (early 2008) and it took less than an hour, though I didn't keep anything from my previous installation.

[+Asmodai MVC]

You should just be able to download the ISO and do a clean install. Clean installs are always the way to go.

I agree, despite building and configuring PC's since High School (I'm 41 now) and working in the IT field for almost 20 years I've NEVER done an in-place upgrade and would prefer not to do so now.  I'd love to do a clean install unfortunately Microsoft doesn't give me a choice as you have to upgrade the OS to register the hardware before you can do a clean install (My intent was to do a clean install once the upgrade was complete and the hardware was registered if everything went smoothly.)

[+Asmodai MVC]

I'm pretty sure your HDD is on the fritz. And not since now and not from Windows 10.

I use the laptop every day and I had no issues prior to Windows 10.  I seriously doubt there are any hardware issues with the hard drive.

[TAZMINATOR]

You should just be able to download the ISO and do a clean install. Clean installs are always the way to go.

He has to upgrade first in order to get free copy of Windows 10.  If he did the clean install for first time, he will be asked for a key.

 

He first need his hardware registered with the server before doing anything at all.

He can choose upgrade during that time so his hardware can be sent to the server for up to date account. After that, he can do clean install anytime on same device.

 

[+Asmodai MVC]

I have a laptop from 2008 and it supports booting from USB. 

Your Windows installation is never deleted due to this problems. I don't know if by shutting it down and starting it again it will rollback to your previous OS. But worry not, your information is not lost. At worse, you'll need to extract the Hard Drive from the laptop and load it externally in other place for doing so. 

As for the Windows 7 ugprade, you do not need to install Windows Vista. You can perfectly install windows 7 and use your upgrade key for activating your key. If that does not activate your OS, you can use the "Activate by phone" feature which will activate you. I have done this step with no problems! 

 

Now. Thinking a bit, you could try as I've said to shut down the computer and start it again. See what happens and post back. I'm almost sure that it will roll back to your previous OS.

Does your 2008 laptop have an built-in optical drive?  Just curious and I'll definitely check the boot options in the BIOS when I get home if it doesn't recover.

I'm not really worried about my data.  I backed it up as I intended to do a clean install once the upgrade was complete and the hardware was registered.  The issue is if I have to find the media for Vista and/or Windows 7.  I haven't touched those discs in over 5 years and I've moved in that time so I'm not entirely sure I can even find the physical media to reinstall.  Furthermore they aren't retail discs, I do recall being annoyed that the Vista disc is like an OEM image not a standard install disc and I'm pretty sure the Windows 7 upgrade is some special OEM upgrade that does require Vista to be installed in order to work (or at least did the first time... I've never tried to reinstall it so maybe that was just a first time deal).

I hope you're right and it just rolls back when I get home and reboot it.  That seemed unlikely to me when I initially posted but given the responses here I'm a bit more optimistic.  Either way I'll post tonight on what happened.

[DavidM]

I use the laptop every day and I had no issues prior to Windows 10.  I seriously doubt there are any hardware issues with the hard drive.

I have to agree with you, I couldn't figure out why anyone suddenly decided there was a component failure.

My daughters desktop went crazy with Win 10, the update was not started by anyone, but it kept failing and restarting from 0%. When I pulled the GWX off and cleaned the disk there were 10 gigs of updates stored. I get the 3.9 gigs for the upgrade by why were there another 6 gigs of "Service Pack Files" there. You might check the update log and see if something similar has happened.

 

[Nick H. Supervisor]

I hope you're right and it just rolls back when I get home and reboot it.  That seemed unlikely to me when I initially posted but given the responses here I'm a bit more optimistic.  Either way I'll post tonight on what happened.

Heh, first thing is first. Always try turning it back on to see what will happen. You may be worrying about nothing.

I agree with others that "bricked" is the wrong term. It comes from the idea of something turning your device in to nothing better than a paperweight - no options other than that. As it stands right now from the information that you've provided, you would still have plenty of options available to you for the laptop.

It's a shame to hear that you're having such issues with it though. But we all know what Microsoft have to deal with when creating their OS, it can have a few bumps along the way as manufacturers still work on drivers to support the new OS. Maybe that was the issue. I've never heard of it taking 72+ hours to install.

[+Asmodai MVC]

Are you keeping your files? How full is the drive?

I upgraded a fairly old laptop (early 2008) and it took less than an hour, though I didn't keep anything from my previous installation.

I didn't plan on keeping my files but I never got far enough in the install for it to ask me either way.

The drive does not have space issues however I don't know how much is free off the top of my head...

I suspect the hang in the first stage (the windowed part that I ended up just killing) was wifi/bandwidth related (maybe MS servers are just getting hammered as well).  I have no idea why the second stage (full screen circle with percent) took about an hour just to get to 2% and then only made it to 32% over night.  Maybe it got to 32% in 90 minutes though and just hung for the rest of the night... I didn't actually see it hit 32%.

[f5s4t3]

I use the laptop every day and I had no issues prior to Windows 10.  I seriously doubt there are any hardware issues with the hard drive.

Well, it's one of the most common failures in laptops and hanging fits the profile. I lost count on how many times I partitioned laptop HDDs around the bad sectors. 

It could hang because of antiviral product removal, Bitdefender got in the way of two of my Windows 10 installs so far, you could have a malware causing the hanging and so on.

[M123456789]

My old Dell E1505 would not upgrade from Windows 7 (32 bit) because I continually received the Windows 10 upgrade message that my ATI Radeon X1400 was not compatible. However, when I went to Windows 10/Microsoft pages, they stated that the X1400 IS COMPATIBLE.  Therefore, I spent over a week searching for any and all sites to get the latest driver updates.   Since the X1400 is old,  Dell no longer provided any new updates and ATI was taken over by AMD, and they do not support that card any longer.   I searched 100's of websites to try to update the drivers.   

In the meantime, I successfully upgraded my laptop to Windows 8.1 Pro (32 bit) from discs that I had never used.

I created a USB media creation tool http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10 .   The instructions are located at http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-10/media-creation-tool-install and successfully (last night) upgraded to Windows 10.   I right clicked on the media creation tool .exe and ran it as administrator.  

Hope this helps, good luck.

 

[+Asmodai MVC]

Heh, first thing is first. Always try turning it back on to see what will happen. You may be worrying about nothing.

I agree with others that "bricked" is the wrong term. It comes from the idea of something turning your device in to nothing better than a paperweight - no options other than that. As it stands right now from the information that you've provided, you would still have plenty of options available to you for the laptop.

It's a shame to hear that you're having such issues with it though. But we all know what Microsoft have to deal with when creating their OS, it can have a few bumps along the way as manufacturers still work on drivers to support the new OS. Maybe that was the issue. I've never heard of it taking 72+ hours to install.

Heh, technically I haven't turned it off... I'm pretty sure it will still be on and at 32% when I get home.  As I said though I'm more optimistic about what will happen when I reboot now then I was when I initially posted.  Even if it reboots fine though I wouldn't say I have NOTHING to worry about... as I still need to get Win10 on it at some point but the worry would indeed be significantly less.

I'm not really sympathetic to MS on this.  I'm prepared for things like the video being VGA mode only until proper drivers are found or the touchpad or fingerprint reader not working.  If the install hangs indefinitely it's all them (unless it was a hardware error).  As far as I'm concerned they're asking for trouble by making people do in-place upgrades in order to get the free version.  Maybe it is being caused by some software I have installed... if it were up to me I'd have wiped the drive first and that wouldn't have been an issue but since they insist on in-place upgrades they reap what they sow.  I've always strongly advised people against doing this sort of upgrade specifically because of all the potential issues with all the random software that could be installed on the system and yet here MS is forcing people to do it in order to get the free upgrade.

[PGHammer]

Hangs can happen for the darndest reasons - and not alone with portables.

Since I've gotten Windows 10 Pro settled on the Dead Hardware Express (testing desktop), I've been looking at current Linux distributions to compare it to.  While the current versions of openSuSE, Sabayon, and even Kubuntu boot up just fine from USB, Exton Linux Live DVD/USB does not boot to a display at all - and the only (supposed) difference is a slightly newer kernel than Kubuntu Wily alpha (which I am posting this from).  So explain tro me why Kubuntu works and Exton Live wouldn't - on identical hardware.

[Mockingbird]

Windows doesn't modify your BIOS/UEFI, so it couldn't have possibly bricked your laptop.

[+Asmodai MVC]

Windows doesn't modify your BIOS/UEFI, so it couldn't have possibly bricked your laptop.

So there might have been a touch of hyperbole in the topic header.   You're the third person to make note of that.  The others at least went on to contribute something to the discussion.  But yes, you are correct (as were the two before you), I didn't technically brick the laptop.