This tool can't upgrade your PC

[BobW]

I upgraded my Win8.1 to Win10 and had no problems for a couple of weeks. Then problems developed and got worse as I tried to resolve them. My Win10 images refused to load, so I used my USB Win10 repair tool to reinstall Win10 to bare metal. Then I restored an image of my prior version (Win8.1 Pro x64). It is running properly at present. Today I tried to use the MS upgrade tool to reinstall Win10, but it reported "The language or edition of the version of Windows installed on your PC isn't supported by this tool." Hours and many attempts later, I have verified that my 8.1 updates were done and made attempts to install Win10, but all failed. I spent over an hour trying to boot to safe mode to try the installation from there, but all attempts failed (after following the steps I found on various web sites).

My guess is that I could return to Win10 with another bare metal install, but I really want to avoid nuking all of my installed programs. The upgrade worked the first time and did not harm my installed programs. Is there any way to do this again?

 

[Dan99]

You did not perhaps configure BIOS to Fast Boot? That can cause failure to boot.

 

[BobW]

Dan - Thanks. You were right that I had fast boot turned on. I have turned it off, but unfortunately, I have not yet been able to boot into safe mode. I tried using F8.

 

[Dan99]

Yea, that seldom works with Windows 10.

OK Run msconfig select boot/safe mode.

 

[BobW]

Dan - I ran msconfig and that worked. Going to safe mode, however, didn't help me with the Win10 install, since there is no network connection. I think I will try using task manager to shut down as many tasks as possible, then try the upgrade again.

 

[Dan99]

Of course you can not upgrade without a network connection. You must be able to connect to the internet. Do you have a media disk? I am thinking a more knowledgeable person than I should step in here. Wait for it...

 

[Trouble]

I'm almost certain that you cannot perform an upgrade to the Operating System from Safe Mode, even if you tick the radio button to include network = Safe Mode with Networking.
I would....
1. Attempt to clean boot the system https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/929135 (use the steps for your OS )
2. Acquire the ISO and mount the ISO from within Windows 8.1 and perform an in-place upgrade from that.
The installation media can be obtained through either of these two resources.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/techbench
OR
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

Once you have the ISO, you can use ImgBurn to burn it to a DVD or Rufus to burn it to a USB ThumbDrive, either of which you can use to perform the inplace upgrade or as I mentioned above you can simply mount the ISO from within Windows 8.1 w/update..... and click the setup.exe from there.
Windows 8.1 must have been updated to include most if not all of the available updates.

 

[BobW]

Thanks to all for the helpful comments. I finally got 10 installed again and am writing from it now. Before the last attempt (the one that worked) I used task manager to close just about everything. Most likely the problem was that I did not turn off my virus protection software (BitDefender).

 

[Trouble]

Glad you were able to work through it and ended up with some positive results.
Thanks for the follow-up.