Dell Venue 8 Pro -upgrade to Windows 10 failed more than 25 times

Hello HoosierDaddy Welcome to the Ten Forums!

Sounds like you were caught between a rock and a hard place there! You spend a lot on unnecessary time waiting for the "Reserved Copy"? I could imagine which here wasn't to be seen until Sept. 1, 2015 after a full month of having 10 on and running not only on just one machine but try two desktops and a laptop.

The laptop was the most fun however when you couldn't boot from any usb drive or device, ut oh so much for Media Creation tool media! until using the dvd option to see both 32bit and 64bit flavors for Home and Pro editions burned to disk to solve that fast! The upgrade as expected activated but was a total mess! No Start button, nothing on the Start>Settings screen but a total blank! And no access to the AllApps section where all those programs?! "Holy s@3s1 Bong! ding @#@" Grrrr...

Never got that far! I had already planned to nuke the upgrade for a clean install first with the 32bit flavor of 10 Home to replaced the 32bit 7 Home Premium upgrade to 10 and then replace the 32bit 10 install entirely for the 64bit once activation of clean install was confirmed. The 64bit went right on but one little problem. You can't shrink Factory HP OEM Primary partitions any! Total drive wipe mandate then pursued seeing everything wiped clean for a new slightly smaller primary and a new second backup partition created for the single drive only now 64bit 10 Home laptop!

Having nuked the entire drive provided a good deal of left over empty drive space and little going on the laptop to begin with meaning plenty of room for the second backup partition on the 500gd drive. The clean install with everything on came out to be about 88gb while I could see a 265gb backup parition made for storage as well as not exactly a full image but selective file backup area. An external drive took care of the full system image back up option there.