Trouble with upgrade from Windows 7

sleepless · 12 Jun 2016

So i finally decided to upgrade my Win7 laptop. the upgrade assistant verified all apps as compatible and enough hard drive space was available. all the update files were downloaded, but installation always got stuck at 99% (possibly a driver issue?). anyway, i decided to DL the .iso from MS. i created a bootable USB stick, using Rufus. since i only wanted to upgrade for now (rather than a fresh install), i decided to try running the setup.exe from within windows, and to my surprise everything worked. however i didn't notice any "upgrade" option. so, it seems that windows 10 was installed, but none of my applications or settings were kept. it's basically a fresh install, with all my old files in a windows.old folder. shouldn't all my settings and apps have been carried over with an upgrade? how can I upgrade to windows 10, without losing everything? i have no idea what steps I should take next, so any help someone can provide would be greatly appreciated. thanks

EDIT: After again looking at the upgrade tutorial, it seems I did not notice any options/screens to keep settings, apps, or personal files. i don't know why not because I was paying careful attention to all the steps. anyway, I still have no idea where to go from here.

simrick · 12 Jun 2016

sleepless said:

So i finally decided to upgrade my Win7 laptop. the upgrade assistant verified all apps as compatible and enough hard drive space was available. all the update files were downloaded, but installation always got stuck at 99% (possibly a driver issue?). anyway, i decided to DL the .iso from MS. i created a bootable USB stick, using Rufus. since i only wanted to upgrade for now (rather than a fresh install), i decided to try running the setup.exe from within windows, and to my surprise everything worked. however i didn't notice any "upgrade" option. so, it seems that windows 10 was installed, but none of my applications or settings were kept. it's basically a fresh install, with all my old files in a windows.old folder. shouldn't all my settings and apps have been carried over with an upgrade? how can I upgrade to windows 10, without losing everything? i have no idea what steps I should take next, so any help someone can provide would be greatly appreciated. thanks

EDIT: After again looking at the upgrade tutorial, it seems I did not notice any options/screens to keep settings, apps, or personal files. i don't know why not because I was paying careful attention to all the steps. anyway, I still have no idea where to go from here.

Hi sleepless and welcome to Tenforums.

Driver problems usually occur at the first part of the upgrade; creating the "go back" usually fails near the end.

If you ran setup.exe from within W7, the upgrade should have defaulted to keeping your apps, settings and data.

If you appear to have a clean install, with all your old data in the Windows.old folder, and you didn't make an image of your hard drive before performing the install, there may not be any way to go back to where you were. You could have a look in Settings>Update & security>Recovery and see if you have an option to go back to W7 there. You're supposed to have 30 days to make up your mind if you want to keep W10 or not, and an option to rollback. But, I'm just thinking that the failure you were seeing with the original upgrade attempt was the "go back".

bobkn · 12 Jun 2016

You may wish to revert to Windows 7 and upgrade that.

Windows 10 - Go Back to Previous Windows - Windows 10 Forums

I don't know how you got a clean install rather than an upgrade.

You may have to re-install some applications after an upgrade to get them to work properly, but probably not.

In future, I recommend that you image the existing Windows installation before doing anything as drastic as an OS upgrade. That makes it easy to go back if there's a problem. I use Acronis True Image (commercial), but Macrium Reflect Free seems to be very popular for the purpose.

(Saving an image is highly recommended in any case. Makes it easy to recover form malware, hardware failures, etc.)

sleepless · 12 Jun 2016

thanks for yout replies,

there are no "go back" options in the recovery settings. i'm guessing that would only be available with an upgrade.

when i tried upgrading using the media creation tool, i got all the way to step 18 (final step), then stuck at 99%. it was stuck for over 8 hours so i assumed something was wrong. same thing happened when trying to update from within windows. after reading the tutorial, it says to disable antivirus software, which i did not. could that be the problem? again, the MS assistant said all my apps and drivers were compatible.

yes, i did create a backup image before attempting this upgrade. so i guess i'll have to re-install using that image, and then try again to upgrade. i'm concerned though because i ran the setup.exe from the .iso, as described in the upgrade tutorial, from within windows. it says to "extract" the .iso using an unzipper, and then run the file, so i guess i did not do that exactly. like i said, although i created the bootable usb stick, i didn't boot the drive to run the installation. would that be a problem, that i ran the setup.exe from within the bootable usb stick instead of from an extracted folder?

simrick · 12 Jun 2016

sleepless said:

thanks for yout replies,

there are no "go back" options in the recovery settings. i'm guessing that would only be available with an upgrade.

when i tried upgrading using the media creation tool, i got all the way to step 18 (final step), then stuck at 99%. it was stuck for over 8 hours so i assumed something was wrong. same thing happened when trying to update from within windows. after reading the tutorial, it says to disable antivirus software, which i did not. could that be the problem? again, the MS assistant said all my apps and drivers were compatible.

yes, i did create a backup image before attempting this upgrade. so i guess i'll have to re-install using that image, and then try again to upgrade. i'm concerned though because i ran the setup.exe from the .iso, as described in the upgrade tutorial, from within windows. it says to "extract" the .iso using an unzipper, and then run the file, so i guess i did not do that exactly. like i said, although i created the bootable usb stick, i didn't boot the drive to run the installation. would that be a problem, that i ran the setup.exe from within the bootable usb stick instead of from an extracted folder?

Good that you have an image - yes, I would restore from that. Then, use 7-zip to extract the ISO to your desktop, and run setup.exe from your desktop, just like in the video. Please be sure to do the prep work, and uninstall your anti-virus.

bobkn · 14 Jun 2016

sleepless said:

thanks for yout replies,

there are no "go back" options in the recovery settings. i'm guessing that would only be available with an upgrade.

when i tried upgrading using the media creation tool, i got all the way to step 18 (final step), then stuck at 99%. it was stuck for over 8 hours so i assumed something was wrong. same thing happened when trying to update from within windows. after reading the tutorial, it says to disable antivirus software, which i did not. could that be the problem? again, the MS assistant said all my apps and drivers were compatible.

yes, i did create a backup image before attempting this upgrade. so i guess i'll have to re-install using that image, and then try again to upgrade. i'm concerned though because i ran the setup.exe from the .iso, as described in the upgrade tutorial, from within windows. it says to "extract" the .iso using an unzipper, and then run the file, so i guess i did not do that exactly. like i said, although i created the bootable usb stick, i didn't boot the drive to run the installation. would that be a problem, that i ran the setup.exe from within the bootable usb stick instead of from an extracted folder?

That's mysterious.

Normally, if you run the installer from within Windows, you get an upgrade. (It doesn't matter where the installer is located. If you started from Windows 8, you could even mount the .iso as a virtual drive, and run the installer from that.)

To get a clean install, you'd normally have to boot from the USB device. Further, if you booted from the USB device and asked for an upgrade rather than a clean install, you would be directed to reboot and run the upgrade from within Windows.