no longer seems able to apply an update

@kevvers Seems one reason may be that other partitions are marked as active. You don't dual-boot by any chance? See...

I had to disable the hard drive with GRUB+Linux in the BIOS so the only active hard drive was Windows'. After the upgrade, I re-enabled the other hard drive and kept using Linux as the primary...

...Had the same problem with a HP Laptop. Upgraded to SSD and moved operating system using Mini Partition Wizard.... I got the "We're having trouble determining if your PC can run Windows 10". I found that the boot partition was marked active and not the "C:" drive.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/w...0-4aa68f502a44

kevvers said:

I could not understand much of what went on earlier in this thread, but need to do something to my working Windows 10 that no longer seems able to apply an update.

running a command prompt as Administrator:
sfc reports no problems
dism reports no problems

Attempting to follow the instructions for an "elevated command prompt" (following the link at the top of this article) fails because both of those commands fail: sfc gets part way through and reports something like "System protection cannot complete requested tasks" and dism reports that /CheckHealth is unknown.

So I'm trying to do a repair with the 1607 ISO (on DVD). It fails in a very interesting way. It says it can't tell if this computer supports Windows 10. I took a screenshot of that. Please note:
1. It's already running windows 10, and it is activated.
2. It runs dual intel Xeon processors (each with 8 cores, hyperthreaded to 16 threads)
3. It has 256 GB (really!) of RAM
4. Not shown, but the primary drive has over 400 GB of free space.

Maybe somebody can guess exactly what it thinks keeps this machine from running Windows 10??? I could sure use some help with this.

To get DISM /online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth /Source: to work, you would need to use a version 1511 WIM file or files from a mounted Windows folder for version 1511.

If you want to quickly prove that 1607 will run on your hardware, just shrink drive C: by 64GB, boot with the 1607 install media and Custom install Windows to the unpartitioned space that was created when you shrunk C:. You can shrink C: easily in Disk Management or with Diskpart. This will create a second install of Windows, which will be Default in a dual-boot setup. This can be changed or easily deleted when you are done with it.

Various things can pose a problem for Windows upgrade to 1607. The best results for the upgrade to 1607 are by first completely uninstalling any non-Microsoft antivirus, restarting with a clean boot and also disabling all network adapters before launching setup.exe for the upgrade. Some have to also disconnect any USB devices that they can and others even have to disconnect extra hard disks during the upgrade. The clean boot uses msconfig to disable all non-Microsoft Services and Task Manager to disable all Startup items. All of this can be enabled after the upgrade succeeds.

Bree said:

@kevvers Seems one reason may be that other partitions are marked as active. You don't dual-boot by any chance? See... http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/w...0-4aa68f502a44

That was it! I do dual-boot, with Windows on the first drive and an MSDOS partition style, and with Linux on all the other drives (quite a few of them,) all with GPT partitions. I use GRUB to boot, and had never noticed that none of the MSDOS partitions were marked active, since GRUB does not care. I marked the Windows boot partition as active, and got a lot of updates, including the anniversary update. Thanks very much.

Glad to have helped.