Win10 upgrade stops at 24% fails with 0xc0000f

Mark Phelps · 02 Aug 2015

Upgrade of Win7 HP laptop -- not usual failure code. Upgrade done through Windows Update (copy was reserved). Gets to 24%, restarts, bring up Recovery screen, fails with 0xc0000f -- a required device isn't connected.

Only one physical drive in the laptop -- works fine under Win7.

Have seen threads about problems with System Reserved being too small for Win10 (200MB for Win7 vs. 450MB for Win8). Tried shrinking C: and resizing System Reserved.

Repeats above problems -- plus, leaves laptop in weird mode with Win10 partially installed, a new Recovery partition, and nothing working (meaning, Win7 won't boot anymore).

Am now trying option of installing from DVD, after merging boot stuff into C: partition and removing System Reserved -- figuring that if Win10 requires a System Reserved partition, it knows how to create one the right size.

Anyone else run into this? Anyone know how to work around this problem? Please don't suggest a wipe and new install -- I've got too much on this laptop to spend hours hunting down CDs and product codes to have to reinstall everything from scratch.

Kyhi · 02 Aug 2015

MBR or EFI

windows 10 uses 3 MBR and 4 UEFI partition

100MB system boot
16MB reserve (GPT only)
OS
450MB recovery

Mark Phelps · 02 Aug 2015

Kyhi said:

MBR or EFI

windows 10 uses 3 MBR and 4 UEFI partition

100MB system boot
16MB reserve (GPT only)
OS
450MB recovery

System is MBR -- and, as you indicated, it did create a Recovery partition -- but the Recovery option does not work. It tries to do repair but fails.

Know if anyone has tried this without an existing System Reserved partition? Asking because I don't have the time to do this right now and would like to know before I charge down another path.

Update: Tried this from DVD and it failed even worse than before! It again rebooted at 24% but this time, the message was "no operating system".

Obviously this rush-to-market Win10 Upgrade is not ready for prime time, I'm wiping the reservation, going back to Win7, and will see what happens over the next few months.

BTW, I have four PCs eligible for the Win10 upgrade -- two laptops and two desktops. With this recent failure, that is BOTH laptop upgrades that have failed. So at this point, Win10 is 0 for 2 -- not a very good score.

I'll try one of the desktops in the next few days, even though it's still awaiting notification. If that fails as well (as I suspect it will), I'll probably NOT even try the other desktop.

I've been installing and upgrading Windows machines for years, and this is the first time I've encountered this failure rate!