Windows 10 is great.
It genuinely feels like a step forward instantly upon first experiencing it. Windows 8.1 took me nearly a year before I could appreciate it's advancements over Windows 7.
I upgraded my Surface Pro 3 on the night after Windows 10's release. I started the upgrade process, went to bed, and was talking to Cortana before I could pour my coffee.
I never received any notification in Windows Update to upgrade, so I used the Media Creation Tool to kick-start the process. It went smooth and all of my programs, settings, even small customizations I had made carried over to Windows 10 perfectly. An impressive feat by Microsoft.
I watched the same story unfold on 2 more computers, one with older and somewhat out-of-the-ordinary hardware (optical touch screen, weird unlisted AMD processor, etc.), the other a brand new custom built Haswell i3 Baby-Gamer.
I even watched the upgrade succeed on my roommates non-genuine crackedWindows 8.1 Pro, and genuinely activate.
So I decided to do the same upgrade on my production desktop.
Downloaded the tool media creation tool from Microsoft.
Told it to upgrade my desktop, opposed to create an ISO. (same process for all the others I've done)
Downloaded the Windows 10 Pro data via the tool.
Started the upgrade process, chose to keep my "Apps and Person Files" and let it begin.
It installed, rebooted a couple times, everything going normally.
It took a little bit longer installing device drivers, but seemed to get through it ok.
It carried my user-name over (non-Microsoft account user, same as all the other machines save for my Surface Pro 3)
I turned off all the creepy telemetry switches and the upgrade completed normally.
I logged in, but it took a long time at the "Preparing Windows" stage.
Once logged in, I was dropped to a black background, explorer had not loaded yet, but I expected it to very soon.
Then I got a few pop up boxes.
We got big error here... :(
<Insert startup program name here> has stopped working...
[Ctrl] + [Shift] + [Esc] = TaskMgr.exe has stopped working...
[Ctrl] + [Alt] + [Del] seemed to work ok, but couldn't do anything other than reboot or log out from this point.
Couldn't get a command prompt open, couldn't do much anything at this point, so I rebooted. Nothing changers, same errors.
Rebooted over to ArchLinux to poke around a bit and see if there are any signs of what's gone wrong.
Partition mounted up fine, so no Hiberfil.sys was created, indicating hybrid shutdown didn't occur. Nothing really informative about that other than perhaps Windows hasn't yet fully configured itself so far.
Did a Code:
ls -Rlsh /mnt/Windows.old
Probably part of how the Windows 10 upgrade migrates my "Apps and Personal Files".
/mnt/Windows.old/Windows appears to contain all of it's old Data from Windows 8.1.
Still nothing very informative discovered yet.
Code:
ls -Rlsh /mnt/Windows
Windows 10's Windows directory appeared intact and fully populated, but under closer inspection, more than 40,000 files throughout this directory are reparse points. Unfortunately reparse points aren't supported on Linux's NTFS driver implementation.
I discovered a possible point of failure, but could go no further under Linux as I cannot determine where these reparse points lead.
I rebooted to my custom made multi-purpose WindowsPE to try to get further. The repairs-point files appeared to be valid, but before I took a closer look at them I performed a CHKDSK on the partition.
It reported that extended attributes were set on the reparse points, and that this was an error needing to be fixed. I let CHKDSK /F clean this up, and after it reported no errors on the partition.
Rebooting back to Windows 10 still failed in the same way.
I will be posting more info as I dig deeper into this, hopefully uncovering a solution.
If anybody has any information they would like to provide, feel free to.
