W10 update error on (really) old laptop: SAFE_OS phase

@bobjoe It is an Acer Aspire 9301 with AMD Mobile Turion 64 CPU and NVidia GeForce Go 6100 graphics. 2Gb RAM.

Disc transfer speeds are slow, when making a backup with AOMEI my Dell (with an SSD) shows around 300Mb/sec while the Acer shows around 8 to 15Mb/sec. How long have you got...… So a 2.5 minute backup on the Dell runs to 45 minutes or whatever on the Acer.

Installing past versions of W10 (and W8.1) hit a problem in the final stages of installation where things suddenly come to a crawl. To complete the installation takes around 8 hours or more. I discovered that system interrupts were the problem and the cause was the Atheros WiFi driver. Disabling that lets things speed up to normal and I could then load a workable driver onto the system.

1809 has the same driver issue but fails to install at the part where you give the PC a name and connect to a network. It defaults to a small weird error message in some foreign language and just freezes at that. Tried a couple of times with no success.

So I clean installed x86 1809 onto my Dell and didn't connect to any network (so no updates or anything). Having done that I imaged the drive with AOMEI Backupper and used the dissimilar hardware restore onto the Acer.

It all works but is painfully slow with lots of disc thrashing. Booting up often blue screens with a 'Something went wrong message... we need to gather information to send to Microsoft' and then it reboots OK. Its just to slow to be usable though.

Hmm, looks like your Dell and HP 530 are running a slightly newer version of my chipset, which is (according to DxDiag) an Intel 915GM/910ML/915MS chipset.

See this:
Win10 drivers for Intel 915GM - Windows 10 Forums

Also you can ask for help in this thread:
Let's run Win10 on really really old hardware - Page 34 - Windows 10 Forums

(I have zero experience with 915GM, sorry.)

Mooly said:

@bobjoe It is an Acer Aspire 9301 with AMD Mobile Turion 64 CPU and NVidia GeForce Go 6100 graphics. 2Gb RAM.

Interesting, you have an AMD card and NVIDIA graphics. So definitely your issues are not being caused by your GPU.

muchomurka said:

See this:
Win10 drivers for Intel 915GM - Windows 10 Forums

Also you can ask for help in this thread:
Let's run Win10 on really really old hardware - Page 34 - Windows 10 Forums

Very interesting... Thanks for the links. Looks like this whole ordeal is Intel's fault, from 2006 and MS's Vista days! I knew that 915GM only had XPDM drivers, and I also know that starting with Windows 8, XPDM drivers are blocked. But I didn't know that Intel has been ignoring 915GM chipset customers in their request for WDDM drivers since 2005, and also, ignoring false advertising claiming 915GM was "Vista capable" right on their website!


Despite all this info I just learned, though, it doesn't explain why my laptop installs 1511 perfectly fine but chokes when trying to install 1809 or 1803. Microsoft DEFINITELY messed something up between the release of 1709 (latest build I can run on this laptop) and 1809 (latest release).

Perhaps there's an issue with the MS Basic Display Adapter driver? Is that even possible? It's supposed to be a generic driver that lets you SEE at least something on the screen. How can they mess that up???

Perhaps there's an issue with the MS Basic Display Adapter driver?

Afaik the issue is only Windows detection/installation routine in 1803/1809... MS decided to stop supporting some old HW. You can try:

- either installing Windows Insider version 19H1 (it should work)
- or installing clean system in virtual machine on other computer, then using Macrium Reflect to transfer virtual installation to your old physical system.

But I am not sure, not owning this HW.

muchomurka said:

Afaik the issue is only Windows detection/installation routine in 1803/1809... MS decided to stop supporting some old HW.

Is there a source on this? I find it so hard to believe that MS can just "stop supporting" hardware without telling anyone what hardware is no longer supported.

- either installing Windows Insider version 19H1 (it should work)

There's a post by @erpster4 on that other thread about running W10 on old computers where he said that build 18353 seems to have fixed some issues regarding "memcpy"... I have no idea what that is, but it looks like MS is aware of what's going on at least.

I'm going to try updating to 19H1 by joining the Insider Program, and I'll report back.

Nope. Didn't work!

I first updated from 1511 to 1709 (latest stable release), then joined the Insider Program and changed the speed to "Fast".

Windows Update started downloading the latest 18358 build. It installed fine, then prompted a restart.

Unlike previously, this time, installing 18358 hung up at a completely black screen (no blue Windows logo like the past). CTRL ALT DEL was completely useless, so I had to hard shutdown the laptop and restart it up again. It booted back up, gave out a BSOD with the usual IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL error, then restarted again and brought me back to 1709.


I am completely out of ideas!

bobjoe said:

Nope. Didn't work!

I first updated from 1511 to 1709 (latest stable release), then joined the Insider Program and changed the speed to "Fast".

Windows Update started downloading the latest 18358 build. It installed fine, then prompted a restart.

Unlike previously, this time, installing 18358 hung up at a completely black screen (no blue Windows logo like the past). CTRL ALT DEL was completely useless, so I had to hard shutdown the laptop and restart it up again. It booted back up, gave out a BSOD with the usual IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL error, then restarted again and brought me back to 1709.


I am completely out of ideas!

forget it, bobjoe

any hardware using Intel 910x/915x chipset (desktop or laptop/mobile) are incompatible with newer win10 versions like 1803 & 1809 (AND using Intel Pentium M processors). the 1803 32bit/x86 version did work however with the Intel Core Duo (Yonah) processor using Intel 945GM graphics chipset on my mom's Dell Inspiron e1405 laptop but not the 1809 version. 915g/915p/915gm/915pm chipsets [Intel GMA 900] are missing the "hardware scheduler" feature and some "hardware & transform lighting" effects (Wikipedia on Intel GMA) that are found in the 945g/945gm & similar chipsets

consider using an old LTSB version like LTSB 2015 (v1507) or LTSB 2016 (v1607) instead since those will get updates for 10 years - both of these seem to work for Intel 910/915 chipsets and Pentium Ms

Edit: the only way I got v1809 to work on the Dell Inspiron e1405 laptop was to change the Intel "Yonah" processor to a "Merom" version (yes I had to shut down the laptop, open up the CPU panel, take out the Core Duo CPU and pop in the Core 2 Duo CPU and then close the CPU panel and then turn on the laptop)

the 1809 version does not seem to work at all with 32bit only CPUs like Pentium Ms (all versions like Banias and Dothan) and Yonah processors

erpster4 said:

any hardware using Intel 910x/915x chipset (desktop or laptop/mobile) are incompatible with newer win10 versions like 1803 & 1809 (AND using Intel Pentium M processors).

Well I am starting to realize this myself now, yes, but how do you know that 1803/1809 officially dropped support for Intel 910/915 series? There is NO documentation ANYWHERE on MS's site or the Insider blog. WTF?

erpster4 said:

915g/915p/915gm/915pm chipsets [Intel GMA 900] are missing the "hardware scheduler" feature and some "hardware & transform lighting" effects (Wikipedia on Intel GMA) that are found in the 945g/945gm & similar chipsets

How do we know that 1803/1809 started "requiring" those two features?

erpster4 said:

consider using an old LTSB version like LTSB 2015 (v1507) or LTSB 2016 (v1607) instead since those will get updates for 10 years - both of these seem to work for Intel 910/915 chipsets and Pentium Ms

Of course those will work since they're based on older builds. You're correct that they work perfectly fine, but we all know that end users shouldn't be using LTSB/LTSC.... At least not legally.

erpster4 said:

the 1809 version does not seem to work at all with 32bit only CPUs like Pentium Ms (all versions like Banias and Dothan) and Yonah processors

And this is what continues to confuse me. WHAT happened between 1803/1809 that suddenly made Pentium M's unbootable on Windows 10?

It's been a few days since the last update to this thread, anyone find any more info on this?