Windows 7 x86 upgrade hangs on FIRST BOOT with spinning icon

Hello Katanga Welcome to the Ten Forums!

You could actually see a nice fresh install of 10 go simply by following a rather unique option of seeing the 7 activation status passed along to the fresh copy of 10. Clean Install Windows 10 Directly without having to Upgrade First - Windows 10 Forums

One thing learned over the years here was that for every newer version a clean install was always the preferred route to take right from the start. But MS pulled a fast one with 10 trying to force the upgrade type install that too often can turn out buggy!

For not being able to see 10 go at all however that brings us to what I saw here intentionally walking into 10 blindly last summer having first seen a clone of the 7 Ultimate drive over to the second OS drive now the default 10 drive since and later when 10 simply wouldn't go on a fresh install of 7 still wouldn't take until the two storage drives were unplugged! That I found out when then turning to the other clean install guide and reading the notations! Windows 10 - Clean Install - Windows 10 Forums

What happened then and likely is what you are now running into is the "10 Installer Gets Confused" problem where the temp install folders created are place in one place while the boot files end up elsewhere! Those would be on drives without any OS at all! I found the "$Windows~BT" and "~WS" folders on the first of the pair of storage drives while the boot loader ended up on the second!

If you have any non OS drives plugged including flash drives, an external hard drive, or drive in a usb enclosure those would need to be unplugged. For any internal drive simply pulling out the 7pin data cable after first shutting everything down as a precaution should then be able to see 10 go on without fuss. But even for an upgrade install review the guide for that as well as the others! Windows 10 - Upgrade Installation - Windows 10 Forums

An isolated type upgrade install is what Fafhrd is referring to there to prevent any inferences from updates getting in the way of the OS upgrade itself. As for the WU reset method for 7 it would best to look over the guide for that over at SF. The steps for 7 will be outlined there as well as seeing Option One a download for repair. Windows Update - Reset - Windows 7 Help Forums

I read that BCD.corruption may be involved in this sort of problem and that rebuilding the BCD may help. Open an admin command prompt and run bootrec /rebuildBCD before retrying setup:
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/w...3aee7fb?page=2

I will confess that this particular Seven install began life as Windows 95 back in 1996 or so, and was subsequently upgraded to Windows 98, Windows 2000, XP, Vista and finally Seven. Might there be some holdover from one of these outdated OSs that is blocking the upgrade?

The i3 3225 is not an old enough processor, (launched in Q3 2012), surely, to have had that upgrade history?

It sounds like the old joke about the guy who had been using the same broom for 40 years with six replacement heads and 4 replacement handles over that time!

I seriously doubt that the upgrade history is very relevant - the NTFS from Windows 2000 et seq. will have wiped all traces of the FAT32 for Windows 9X, and The Windows 7 BCD will have replaced the legacy NT bootmanager.

I'm running with the belief that the minimum system requirements are not being met for 10. You are now looking at a 20yr. system trying to upgrade into 10 when having started with how large of a drive? It takes a good 88gb for 10 Pro and likely over 75gb for the Home edition with the addition of the Windows.old and other folders during an upgrade. 7 Ultimate will fit on a 60gb primary in contrast still having been a single not dual platform OS now being seen with 10. Lack of drive space anyone?

Back in 1996 you wouldn't have even been seeing a 13gb hard drive. Here I upgraded out of an old IBM 386 with a 200mb into an AST 486 where I swapped out the 500mb for a 1.2gb WD at the time first seeing 95 and later 98SE. Finally when drive capacities started climbing XP was able to first see 120gb drives when dual booted with 98 and a pair of 250s while 98SE couldn't realize the full capacities of those drives.

That was on VM not a physical install I ran into the default 60gb vhd simply not being enough. And you would normally expect there would have been hardware as well as OS upgrades over that amount of time as well. The second build here with only 8gb of memory and the original 500gb drive I saved out of an old Vista case last having seen the 7 beta, RC builds saw 7 Pro at first upgraded to 10 and since wiped clean and now running strictly Insider builds there.

At first I tried creating a second primary for the initial clean install to follow as a dual boot to verify 10 would activate last summer and had to wipe the drive entirely for the final install which has seen numerous newer builds upgrade over the 10565 I later saw go on fresh when you could still grab that from the Tech bench site. The drive is still in good working order to allow all that and one item that could be checked there.

The 500gb here was new for the Vista build back in 2007 when bought in a pair with the other now in another 7 Pro case. I told the friend I passed that along to that he could try out 10 on a second drive that could be added in to get a look at the new version but so far he has simply been occupied with an 8.1 laptop where he wants to see that drive swapped out.

The other thing I noticed was Katanga's reference to the other partition.

This is definitely a software issue, because one of the partitions has been successfully upgraded

That would suggest trying to set up a dual 10 dual boot with two upgrades not one being seen.