Anyone know if MS are addressing Insider build upgrade issues?

Mark Phelps · 13 Jul 2017

This Spring I ran into serious problems doing Insider upgrades -- and I have been doing those since nearly the first days it came out.

What has worked since then has been using the ISO to do "major" increment upgrades, making an image backup after that, and then using Windows Update to do the next "minor" increment upgrade. That way, if the build rollback does not work (as it has failed on me, more than once) I can restore a working build from the image backup.

Josey Wales · 13 Jul 2017

Fafhrd said:

The thing about failed installs is that if they rollback to the previous build, the failure codes and logs, as well as the xml metadata from the Panther appraisal during the early downlevel phase of the upgrade can get fed into the Windows error reporting telemetry machine.

These may then be analysed statistically to discover which elements of certain diverse systems are involved in the failure states across the Insider population that experiences problems.

I'll point you to this thread, concerning an old device driver that worked until 1703 Creators Update:

Old computers not yet compatible with 1703 (Broadcom 440x driver) - Windows 10 Forums

Here's a description of the problem from a user's Point of view:

...and from a Microsoft Engineer's analysis of the problem:

from page 10 of Problems with Creators update - Microsoft Community

I know it's no comfort if you can't upgrade to a new build in the Insiders Program on the physical machine you have.

If you can run a Virtual machine, you may manage to run it as an upgrade on the virtual machine's virtual hardware.

You may be able to clean install the new build, but hardware problems may still prevent installation.

If Windows Setup itself is the problem, it may also be able to install if you sidestep the Windows Setup by using DISM as in Kari's excellent tutorial:

Apply Windows Image using DISM Instead of Clean Install Windows 10 Installation Upgrade Tutorials

I do not know who or which post you are referring to but I did not roll back to an older build during the failed install. I was able to install it with an ISO which still did not solve my problem with sleep. Today's build did not either so I imaged it and went back to the CU. There is a problem somewhere as this build installed on machines older than mine. I also ran an sfc /SCANNOW and it came up clean. The install via WU took about 1 hour and 45 minutes but It did install with no errors. I will wait till the FCU goes final before I try it again.