Windows 10 upgrade from win 8 Stuck

You won't find this laptop in either of my specs and falls in the "sure I'll take a look at it" family category.

My Nephew's Gateway NE56R48u was being upgraded to 10 when the upgrade hung in one of those moments that the machine needed to restart itself. The screen stayed black and the blue led busy light continues to blink, this has been like this for several weeks and the NE56 has been shutdown and restarted a few times to run for hours by my nephew.

Nothing I've tried works;

• Over 15? different key combinations, press and hold or tap, even using the "SOS" code on f2,
• pulled the cmos battery,
• ran a boot dsk and that didn't take, but I don't believe it was for a gateway with 8 on it, nothing,

I just can't break that update to get 8 to startup. I need to get at least to safe mode with cmd prompt, would something like hiren's or rufus work?

I'll appreciate any and all suggestions even the ones that I may be wasting my time.

Thanks dalchina,

I'm pretty sure the boot dsk I tried wasn't built for win8 and I'm hoping that Kyhi’s Rescue Disk will work (I forgot about that one). Dsk Image? I have mine but I'll check if my nephew has any but I doubt it.

The problem is I'm blind because of the loop or whatever it is, shows the HDD is busy but I can't break the loop and it doesn't help that I don't have a display, it's black.

I'll be out for awhile but I'll be trying Kyhi's dsk and that link to enter gateway's recovery, thanks again for the link. It'd be nice to see some life outta this machine instead of just a blinking light and my reflection staring back at me.

F1-F2? Yep, been there, done that...

dalchina said:

If you power down, power up.. do you even see a PC logo?

No, nothing.

dalchina said:

During that phase you may need to access the BIOS- if you can't even do that, you're pretty much sunk, I fear. That comes before anything disk related, as I'm sure you know.

Yes, I know. Well, I guess my nephews' goin' down with the ship...

I'll still try those two earlier tips to see if anything shakes loose but I don't hold much hope.

Hi hawkman,

To the best of my knowledge no it's still 4GB. But, I had thought of that, it's on my list to re-seat the ram.

Frankly, about over a year ago I updated from Win 8.1 to Win 10.

At first I noticed a drop in speed and performance. I Googled the problem, and I found people complaining that after updating their computers became slow. And how a clean install of Win 10 solved the problem.

But anyway, I thought, I'll just use it like this for a while and see how it goes.

Then the dreaded updates started happening, and lasted for a million hours each. They would restart my lap top without permission, and stuff like that. BAD!

Then one day, after one of the updates, all my folder and file names were suddenly stuck to the left instead of centered as they've always been.

At some point I had enough, and decided to downgrade to Win 8.1. I'm still running Win 8.1, but will be using Win 10 in a few days when my new lap top arrives. Give it another shot.

So for your problem, maybe best to do a real format, and install a fresh copy of Windows 10, instead of updating.

So for your problem, maybe best to do a real format, and install a fresh copy of Windows 10, instead of updating.

That's what we'd like to eventually get around to doing but there has been no success in getting out of the hung update loop, with that in the way the machine won't allow any other functions.

• You turn it on and feel/hear the HDD spin-up,
• The power light is steady,
• The HDD activity light blinks,
• There's no response from any keyboard taps or holds,
• Place a disk in the optical drive and you can hear/feel it spin-up but there's nothing on the display screen,
• I've checked to make sure the brightness is up and the machine is using its display but how can I tell for sure since I don't get a response from the keyboard?
• I do see changes in the activity light blinking rate when pressing any key, but nothing changes and the display screen remains black.
• And you see this for the next 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 hours a blank, black display screen.

But the LED activity lights keep burning/blinking, if you turn it off then back on the same thing happens, for the next 3 to 12hours.

Before I can do anything else; I need a way to break that hung update so the machine can forget about it and boot to the OS.

I'm no expert, but can't you enter the BIOS as soon as the lap top starts, and then set it to boot from CD or USB, and then use a CD or USB with an OS on it to install something - XP, 7, 8, whatever.