Freeze at 33% during update to 1709

zbook said:

How did you discover the problem?

f14tomcat said:

Just a wild guess. He remembered he had disabled the wifi card because it was giving him trouble of some kind. That triggered the thought to yank it. Probably roached or defective and driving the sys nuts! :)

That is exactly right. Some time ago, Windows stopped booting for me, so I went into Safe Mode and disabled several things.
I only disabled devices I didn't care about (on-board audio jacks because I have a sound card, on-board video because I have a GPU, Wi-Fi card because I'm on Ethernet, etc.)

After starting this thread, I decided to re-enable all of the disabled things one by one, and went to the motherboard manufacturer's website to download updated drivers.
There was only a Wi-Fi card driver for Win7 & 8, and when I tried to enable it, the system crashed hard. Mouse froze, no BSOD.

I thought, "Huh, that's an awful lot like the crash I get when I'm updating. I wonder if in all Microsoft's infinite wisdom, they told the update installer to re-enable disabled devices MID UPGRADE? You know, because users disable things for no reason."

Lo and behold, after a system crash and power-down, I removed the card, and re-attempted the download of 1709 from the Media Creation Tool. Success.

This was after four days, one hundreds reboots, several beers, and a lot of cussing.
I think I also swore I'd switch to Linux, but I'm a gamer first, Linux user second, so that's not happening. I needs my Steam library and my Fallouts.

Windows Update to 1079 be aware that it creates a Windows.old folder. it appears to be a full backup. on my system it took up alot of space and has over 100k files! i'm gonna delete it.

ah yes i had to google for that info. use Disk Clean Up not File Manager to delete.
I believe Windows will delete the folder after one month and its just there in case you want to roll-back to the earlier Windows.

biker66 said:

ah yes i had to google for that info. use Disk Clean Up not File Manager to delete.
I believe Windows will delete the folder after one month and its just there in case you want to roll-back to the earlier Windows.

You know, you could have just looked in the tutorials here on TenForums.
Delete Windows.old Folder in Windows 10
You'd be hard-pressed to find a question that doesn't have a tutorial about it :)

It used to be 30 days before it was deleted automatically, but since the Anniversary Update that was reduced to 10 days.

I too am a victim of the 33% death. I've been battling to stave off Windows updates for months, and failing often to see again 33%.
Your post about WiFi Hardware sounded familiar (I got around an early failure by disabling the Wifi driver) but, after consulting you-tube an how to remove my Wifi mini card, I thought an easier approach might work. I disabled Wlan in the F10 setup menu. ethernet is still working. It wasn't long before update asserted itself. This time it worked. I'm now booted under version 1709.

glcinvt said:

I too am a victim of the 33% death. I've been battling to stave off Windows updates for months, and failing often to see again 33%.
Your post about WiFi Hardware sounded familiar (I got around an early failure by disabling the Wifi driver) but, after consulting you-tube an how to remove my Wifi mini card, I thought an easier approach might work. I disabled Wlan in the F10 setup menu. ethernet is still working. It wasn't long before update asserted itself. This time it worked. I'm now booted under version 1709.

Awesome! I'm glad this post helped someone. It was a really frustrating experience.