Insider ISOs - can't get past OOBE stage

Kari said:

Have you tried the Skip button? I've seen that screen a couple of times, usually clicking Skip continues OOBE as if nothing had happened.

Kari

I have - but eventually I get to screens with no Skip option available. The Try Again option from here just whirs the circling dots for a minute or two, then throws me back to the 1st screen and asks me for my Region.

Kari said:

One thing that you could try is Sysprep, it is pretty good in fixing OOBE.

When you come to region selection screen, press SHIFT + F10 to open Command Prompt and enter following command:

%windir%\System32\Sysprep\sysprep.exe /oobe /reboot

This clears current GUIDs and SIDs, restarts computer and runs OOBE again. Takes a minute or so.

I am not saying this resolves your issue, but it has done it for me quite often when OOBE for one or another reason cannot finish setting up Windows.

Kari

Thanks Kari,

I'll give that a go tomorrow.

Kari said:

When you come to region selection screen, press SHIFT + F10 to open Command Prompt and enter following command:
%windir%\System32\Sysprep\sysprep.exe /oobe /reboot

Thanks Kari!

That does seem to get me past the issues.

I still think there is an underlying problem though- it should just work out of the box. What I'm not of sure is whether something has got corrupted in my VirtualBox setup, or whether there's something about 1809 Insider Builds which takes longer and is perhaps failing on a "Timeout". If it's not just confined to Insider then I guess we will see people getting the problem on physical machines as well when 1809 is released...

Thanks for your help in any case. :)

I had a recent Insider update that always failed. I don't think it was this exact reason but it would get to 20% and no further. I tried the update 3 times and each time it failed at the 20% point. I had a Macrium disc image of an earlier version and restored to that version. It then did the update without problems and the last two updates have also updated without problems.

jimbo45 said:

I agree it should work straight OOB but rather than windows update I've found by far the most successful way of installing these builds is to get them via the UUP-->ISO download methods and then manually install from the generated iso.

Thanks Jimbo,

In this case it wasn't Windows Update - I was using the official ISO downloaded from Microsoft's Insider web page, and the OOBE errors happen when I install that ISO.

I had the same problem with the previous ISO too (which I downloaded twice, so I don't think it was a corrupt ISO).

Returning to this thread because I see the problem still persists in the released 1809 ISOs (either the .WIM version or the MCT-created ISO).
But I did see this on the Microsoft site

Cause

This issue occurs because the specific timing of the OOBE process causes a deadlock situation. This issue does not involve hardware, and you can easily fix it.

Workaround

For Issue 1 (“Something went wrong – But you can try again”), click Try again at the bottom of the screen. The OOBE process should continue as expected.
For Issue 2 (“Just a moment…”), press and hold the power button until the system turns off, and then turn on the system again. The OOBE process should resume and complete as expected.

Sadly it isn't that simple and the workarounds still don't help on my VirtualBox setup.

But VirtualBox is slow on this spinning-disk laptop, and my guess is that makes the timing/deadlock more likely.

I also suspect these sort of situations don't make it into the telemetry sent back to Microsoft, because when the setup fails it hasn't got as far as connecting to a network, which won't help them in diagnosing and fixing it...