Win 10 Upgrade Disappeared

[coolblueice]

I just finished all the steps to upgrade my Dell XPS M1330 from 32 bit Win7 Ultimate to Win10.

The upgrade was painfully slow, taking over 8 hours but it finally finished. It actually took me three attempts... all of of which took 8 hours or more. The first two attempts ended after the long "99 percent complete" step when my computer completely froze. The keyboard was completely dead so I could not tell the updater to move forward.

Finally after these three attempts, I got all the way through the steps. The upgrade assistant said it would then shutdown and restart as Windows 10. There was one prompt on the way to shutting down that asked if I wanted to trouble shoot or otherwise access advanced features.... or if I simply wanted to shut down. I chose to shut down.

I thought perhaps windows would restart itself in a few minutes as Windows 10 but after waiting quite a while, the device didn't restart on its own, so I restarted it manually.

Windows started but it was still Windows 7 Ultimate... completely unchanged from where it had started.

Where did my Windows 10 upgrade go? All those steps and all that time just went out the window.

What happened? I don't want to go through all those painfully slow steps again only to have the same Win7 Ultimate OS back again when the reboot happens.

No, there were no other prompts or warnings... The system simply stayed at Win7 Ultimate when it rebooted, as if no upgrade to Win 10 had ever been attempted.

Any ideas?

Thank you!

 

[Trouble]

You may have dodged a bullet...

Product not tested for Windows 10 upgrade
Dell is not testing or developing Windows 10 drivers for this product. If you choose to upgrade, some features, applications, and connected devices may not work as expected.

SOURCE: http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/04/product-support/product/xps-m1330/drivers

Looking over that page, I don't see anything newer than Windows 7 drivers, so you may have your work cut out for you.
I would certainly suggest that before going forward you make sure that all your critical data is backed up and consider a disk image so you have a strong fall back position.

Not knowing any of the specs for that particular machine with regard to the processor, I can't even say for certain that Windows 10 or even 8 for that matter will run on it.
Additionally it may require a BIOS update or other driver updates and possibly even Windows 7 updates before it can succeed.

 

[coolblueice]

Hi "Trouble",

Thanks for your input.

Yes, before I even started the upgrade process, I took a Sys Image. That's just a good habit.

So far when the Win10 upgrade fails, it just "bounces back" to the Win7 install, as if I'd not done anything to it. But the Sys Image is a good failsafe backup in case everything goes south.

When the Win10 upgrade begins, it checks (at some level) the compatibility of the machine with requirements of Win 10. There was no indication that anything should be a problem there... but (of course) that doesn't assure a smooth upgrade.

I'd not used the Dell for a couple of years, so was way behind on the Win7 updates. After the three failed Win10 upgrade attempts, I ran the Win7 updates (11 recommended updates totaling more than a GB of data). I just did that a couple of hours ago.

I even tried running a Sys repair from my Win7 boot disk but that did not reveal anything telling.

So I just started the Win10 upgrade process again (after doing the Win7 updates). Perhaps I will get lucky and the Win10 upgrade will work.

If I do have success, I will update this thread.

Thanks again for the good suggestions (although I'd already thought of a few of them.)