Windows 10 Creators Update available through the Update Assistant

Updated fine, except contents of Documents and Pictures folders missing!!.

Back up is your friend, and everything was soon replaced no harm done.

But MS you said "all your files will be just where you left them" You lied.

thegeriatric said:

Updated fine, except contents of Documents and Pictures folders missing!!.

WOW! Never hard that one before. You sure you have the right folders - are there instances multiple documents and Pictures folders showing? Did you split the OS to save drive space? Did your user profile get changed?

Your stated issue just doesn't seem plausible unless there was something weird with the machine before the update. A lot of times there are pre-existing issues that an upgrade may run into and try to fix only to result in weird issues, and it being blamed for the problem. That is sometimes an update may appear to cause an issue where a pre-existing or impending issue already existed and thus was not the fault of the update.

Anyway check that there aren't multiple user profiles or that your profile wasn't corrupted.

Good luck.

Fafhrd said:

From the outset, I'd just say I don't get my systems in a state - no 3rd party AVs, no Customised Start menu, no registry cleaners etc. I might have 7-Zip and EasyBCD and Macrium, and run a modified hosts file, use Chrome Canary, and restore Windows Photo viewer, but little else.

I have one older laptop that runs Windows 10 fine, with the exception that it won't upgrade, and won't clean install due to lack of OEM drivers and something about Windows 10 setup on that laptop that causes the hardware to be assigned conflicting IRQs. I think it is to do with WinPE during setup and lack of Chipset drivers.

How do I know it can run Windows 10 then?

Initially the laptop was running XP and Windows 7 Ultimate in dual boot.

The Windows 7 failed to upgrade to 1507, so I left it for a few months and tried 1511, which caused a Frankenstein's horror of a protracted overnight installation and then problems with setting up a user because it was running sooo slowly due to the above IRQ assignment problems. Eventually, and extremely slowly, I disabled some hardware in device manager and the system ran, but with the defaultuser0 profile as the main user, and no administrator access, I returned it to Windows 7 from a backup. It had however, I discovered later, assigned a digital licence to the laptop.

Then I discovered the laptop runs a portable Windows 10 Pro as a Windows to Go installation on a USB drive, so it is not the hardware that is a problem, at least as far as running Windows 10 is concerned.

If I use the same logic as a Windows to Go installation, if I avoid Setup, and apply the Windows image to a clean partition on the hard drive from install.wim (or install.esd) using DISM or preferably Imagex, Windows 10 completes the OOBE, I can set up a user, find some older drivers for the chipset and more esoteric hardware, and adjust the basic graphics driver to get a reasonable result on the unsupported Intel integrated graphics.

The next thing to try is to transfer the disk image of this to another machine, upgrade the OS build to the latest Feature update, and transfer it back to the laptop, having wiped the old system off.

Interesting post!

You are most likely right that "WinPE"/"WinPE Setup" is missing some inf drivers, while the actual install.wim has those drivers. Maybe try to update/add drivers to the boot.wim images using DISM?

Curious to hear more about this fossil running and upgrading Windows 10 editions. I have been thinking about putting Windows 10 on a similarly old HP Laptop from the early Windows XP era.

The only time I had a similar issue is when a PC I was given to "fix", with "only one user" (user profile) where the user had decided somewhere along the line to make changes to that profile. I found all the "missing" files and folders relatively easily, and then spent about 8 hours sorting out the files before "fixing" the PC and updating WIN 10.