Brand New HP Elite 800 i7700 8GB 512GB SSD Win10 1709 failure.

Did you make a backup/image backup of the machine before you started updating? If so, you can use that later on to get stuff that might be missing from the clean install that I recommend you do next, starting with wiping the hard disk/SSD from which the laptop boots and letting Windows rebuild itself from scratch. 1709 works just fine on 6 of my 8 computers, so unless they are specific issues for your target laptop, I don't believe you should have any problems getting this to work.
HTH,
--Ed--

Hi Ed,

No, I did not make a backup before starting the updates. With what I have shown on the screenshot above, is it still possible to do so? Is there a rough estimate of how big a pure backup would be? (Need to know if I need a bigger USB memory stick. At least it's USB 3.0)

I'm not at that computer at the moment, but think storage space used was currently ~60GB on C: and ~15-17GB or thereabouts on D:

I did nothing beyond hooking it up to monitor, keyboard, mouse and internet, and immediately going to Windows Update.

I bought the HP Elite as I thought a business oriented machine would be more stable than some home-oriented one with a lot of superfluous stuff. I didn't check the C: drive before starting, is 60GB the usual size for a new Win10 machine, or is that bloat added from this "feature" update?

Thanks again for your advice :)

ETA: it's a compact desktop rather than laptop: (256GB not 512GB of SSD, so not crazy about the OS eating up a quarter of the drive)


HP 800 G3

Manufacturer #

1FY79UT#ABA

Highlights

• 2.9 GHz Intel Core i7-7700T Quad-Core
• 8GB of 2400 MHz DDR4 RAM
• Integrated Intel HD Graphics 630
• 256GB Turbo Drive G2 M.2 PCIe SSD
• 1 x Gigabit Ethernet Port
• 802.11ac Wi-Fi | Bluetooth 4.2
• 1 x USB 3.0 Type-C | 6 x USB 3.0 Type-A
• 3 x DisplayPort
• USB Wired Keyboard & Mouse Included
• Windows 10 Pro (64-Bit)

From the description @ B&H

"The installed operating system is Windows 10 Pro (64-bit), and also included is Windows 10 Pro (64-bit) recovery media."

So I'm guessing D: is the recovery media?

If you've not installed many extra apps, I don't see how the image to be captured could be bigger than 20 GB, so a 32 GB UFD (USB Flash Drive) should be good enough. My advice, however, would be to simply perform a clean install, so you'd need an 8GB UFD to create a bootable installer to handle that chore. Let us know if you need help getting all this stuff sorted. It's easy to handle these tasks if you've done them before; not so much if you need to start from a blank slate.
HTH,
--Ed--