Microsoft 10 upgrade

[hawkman10544]

HP Notebook, 2-1/2 hrs old. Recent auto attempts to download “Windows 10 upgrade”.  Update stalls at 91%, and computer is unusable. Has occurred at least 3 times in past 6 mo. Once allowed it to run for 18 hours with no conclusion. To use

computer must shut down and reboot. What to do?

[WAWood]

@hawkman10544 

IF you are doing the semi-annual Win10 upgrades by downloading the updates from MS, then STOP doing that -- as that is the most troublesome and least reliable way of doing upgrades.

If it were mine, I would do the following -- as doing an in-place Feature Upgrade using Windows Update is unreliable and risky: 

1) Use Macrium Reflect to create a backup on a large USB stick or external drive (see below)

2) Use this link to download and create Win10 install media: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

NOTE: The next Upgrade, to v2004, is not going to be available from that link until early June.  Also, folks testing the Upgrade are reporting SERIOUS problems with it that are NOT going to be fixed by the rollout.  So, your best approach would be to refuse any Upgrades until mid-June, at the earliest.

3) insert that into your PC (do NOT boot from it), find the folder containing the media, select the setup.exe file, right-click that and select Run as Administrator.  This will start an in-place Upgrade which could then take a couple of hours to complete.

If you are presented with a window asking for a product key, down near the bottom is a entry you can click to skip that. Do NOT enter a product key, as it will reuse your existing key and when you finish and get back online, Windows will automatically activate.

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I personally prefer to use third-party Backup solutions as they tend to be both more flexible and more reliable than any built-in solutions.

Macrium Reflect (MR) provides a FREE version that can be used to image and restore partitions or entire drives.

What I recommend is the following:
1) Download and install Macrium Reflect (MR) from here: http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx
2) Run MR and choose the option: "Create an image of the partition(s) required to backup and restore Windows" to write a full backup to an external drive or USB stick
3) Use the option to create a boot USB stick or CD

My experience is that MR, when using the High Compression option, typically can compress the saved image file to about 50% of the USED space in the OS partition. This means if you have an 80GB OS partition, and 40GB is used, MR only needs about 20GB to store the image file.

I use this all the time and it typically takes less than 15 minutes to do the image backup and about the same time or less to do a restore.

NOW, you have the means to restore a full working system from the external drive or USB stick in only a few minutes.