On an upgrade or clean install windows is capable of installing partitions on multiple drives.
The only way to make sure all partitions are created on one drive is to make the other drives unavailable during the upgrade.
This can be accomplished by detaching cables or removing drives.
DVD or USB can be used for the clean install.
OK, I'll unplug the RAID boxes and the internal HD, and use the Blu-Ray disk with the v1903 ISO on it.
I have noticed that Windows Update has scratched entire installation ISOs on the data HD in the past. I would hate to see a recovery partition on E:, or even have E: messed with at all. Ten years of digital photographs and other similarly precious data is on that HD. Never had to use Acronis to recover it.
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It's done. One thing that I need to get accustomed to is that all the internal HDs are sequential, starting with C:, and the optical drive is placed later. The drive letters of my data HD and my optical drive are reversed. I quickly decided to let that stand.
I'm copying back \Data now. That will take hours. The only application I've reinstalled so far is Firefox, which enables synch of all my links and my Norton password monitor. I haven't installed Norton Security yet, but Firefox broght back the Norton browser extensions.
I'll put back Norton, MBAM, and Acronis, set up the rolling backups of Acronis again, install the printer drivers and my photography software. After that, I'll install things as I need them.
Nice progress.
It's not fully functional yet because I don't have printer drivers, LIghtroom or PaintShop Pro installed. Its primary functions will be served when I get some or all of those installed this afternoon.
I've gotten enough of the essentials for computer maintenance and my main uses so that I've moved my day-to-day use back to the main computer. Everything works better, and some irritating things like having to use exe file Properties and change icons twice to get default icons on newly installed or updated software to display, have disappeared. The computer is noticeably faster, too.
A jaw-dropping message appeared for my system HD when I re-installed Hard Disk Sentinel, which reads and displays SMART information on all mounted mass storage. Both internal HDs are fine, as are the two big slow RAID boxes for backup. But, for the system disk, I have this:
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Problems occurred between the communication of the disk and the host 4259 times.
In case of sudden system crash, reboot, blue-screen-of-death, inaccessible file(s)/folder(s), it is recommended to verify data and power cables, connections - and if possible try different cables to prevent further problems.
More information: Hard disk case: communication errors
No actions needed.
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This may or may not give some insight as to why driver verifier would always get a BSOD on boot. It does appear that the OS could not keep the data path to/from the HD working, a lot. This apparently happened under Windows RE or during shutdown or reboot, because I didn't have actual BSODs except when verifier caught something, which was once.
In any case, running the v1903 (or the feature update that you want to run) Windows media (I ran it from USB; had a Blu-Ray ready but didn't need it). Note that validation can be multi-step if you have multiple Windows upgrades in your history, as I did.
If zbook concurs, I'm going to mark this thread as solved. To future readers, my advice as a user is that if the powerful methods given in the first two or three pages of this thread don't work for you, and a current revision feature "update" such as v1803 -> v1803 won't run, then the best course is to back up all your data and do a fresh install including deletion of all partitions on your HD, or even on a new HD. If you are of such a mind, look upon the event as an opportunity to go to a SSD, or a combination SSD system and fast HD data architecture.
Many, many thanks to all who helped out here, most especially zbook, who went quite far beyond the call of duty here.
Glad to read the progress.
The software that displays the error is HD Sentinel (not tested or seen when using HD Tune, Crystal Disk, Sea Tools, etc.)
Some had planned to swap or replace cables. Follow up was missing so it was unknown whether this was required or just a manual entry per the HD Sentinel link.
You are very welcome.
Glad to help.
HD Sentinel is a utility that reads HD Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T. or just SMART) data from each HD and summarizes and displays it graphically, or, if you click on the options, in as much detail as exists, which is truly vast. In particular, SMART data tracks total on time, number of spin-ups and the time taken for each, and a count of bad sectors and the remaining spare sectors the HD hardware has to replace them. Screen shot, with system drive highlighted to show the notice:
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I use Disk Sentinel to let me know when a HD or RAID is starting to get errors so that I can plan to replace it before I have problems. The RAIDs are big, slow (inexpensive and long-life) HDs in RAID 1 that I use for rolling backups, using Acronis.
I got the idea from WD because a similar utility comes with their My Book Duo RAID 0/1 RAID enclosures, but the WD utillity didn't even see my older RAID box. When I looked for a commercial utility that could see all of my HDs and the older RAID box, I turned up Hard Disk Sentinel. The vendor of the old RAID box informed me that there is no data path in their RAID chipset for the temperature sensor, which is why the temperature of that box isn't reported. The temperatures will give you notice when you need to clean the filters, remove obstructions to cooling vents, etc. This type of utility is a good thing for people like me, who home-build top-end computers and keep them for many years.
The follow-up link is to a page on their web site. It tells you how to deal with any problems that you are having, and how to eliminate the message when you are done. The principal recommendation is to replace the SATA cable(s). My solution was to re-install Windows 10, beginning with removing all partitions on the HD and letting the Windows 10 v1903 installation perform a fresh partition.
The OS that went away dates back at least to 2007, when I upgraded Windows XP 64-bit (for which I could not get drivers or an anti-virus that I could trust to keep a 64-bit system safe) with Vista 64-bit (on a two-CPU 2.0 GHz Xeon quad core motherboard) and a 1 TB HD. I don't recall whether I installed Vista over XP or did a full install, but I had an EFI partition so I must have done a clean install of Vista. Windows 7 was out at about the time the old HD started giving problems, so I moved the OS to a new 2 TB HD and installed Windows 7 as an upgrade to Vista. This system apparently never had a recovery partition until I added one a week or so ago as part of my futile attempt to rehabilitate it.
My theory about systems that go that long is that apps and drivers that come and go sometimes leave behind detritus when uninstalled, like no-longer-useful code in the HD read/write data stream or other difficult-to-see places in protected system code. A safe boot may not eliminate these if they are no longer seen by the OS at all. That's why we have Windows RE doing Windows Update when the protected system is involved, operating the Rescue modes, etc. Sooner or later there will be enough dust in the nooks and crannies of the protected code that a clean re-install is called for.
If absolutely necessary, I can buy a 1 TB HD and re-constitute the old Windows 10 system disk on it as a bootable HD. This is possible so long as Acronis has not deleted the last backup of that OS. I have no plans to do this, and I may manually delete that old backup at any time to make room on the RAID for a new backup, so if anyone here really is interested, now is a good time to speak up, because I have absolutely no interest in performing forensics analysis on it anymore.
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