Windows 10 80004005-2004 error and drop back

[bochane]

I am helping a friend. Right now I am not at his place and have not all information in front of me, sorry for that. At some later time I will continue there, but now I am collecting all help and information I can get.

It goes about this:
The download of W10 completes, Preparing for Install completes,
Than a reboot into W10 and you see just a glimpse of the big circle which informs you of the progress
Almost immediately followed by a reboot and error message telling you it's going back. Hence an error condition shows up at the very start of the actual upgrade.

There are some 'interesting' points in his configuration:
- Windows defender has been replaced by free Comodo AV - I disabled it. Maybe I have to remove it.
- There is a partition called 'Restore' and or 'Recovery' on the HD that also holds the C: partition. Somewhere I read that this also may be a cause, because the upgrade process uses these names itself.

Has anyone seen this error?
Any ideas about the restore partitions
Any ideas about Comodo AV?
Or any other advice on how to proceed?

Thanks in advance,
Henk

 

[BIGBEARJEDI]

Hi henk,
First thing that comes to mind is what is the make/model of the computer with the failed WinX upgrade? desktop or laptop?

Next, did you or your friend remember to run the WX Upgrade Assistant prior to clicking the upgrade button?

Haven't seen this exact error code--did you try to google it? (not that that would help-LOL!).

There are several things that I would try:

1. Test the hard drive with SEATOOLS, and see if the hard drive is failing or faulty. If your friend's computer is 5 yrs. old or older that's highly likely. If you run BOTH short and long tests, and either returns an error, that hard drive is faulty and must be replaced.

2. Once you determine if the hard drive is ok, and rule out hardware issues, it could be driver corruption, or windows file corruption or something software related and you can then troubleshoot software--Windows installation--from there.

3. On the Comodo; I haven't had many Customers run this, and it's not on my list of approved AV programs, so, yes, I would definitely uninstall it--but, make sure you or your friend has a recent backup of all his Personal Data to external media which includes all his Documents, Photos, Music, Videos, E-mails, checkbook, etc. PRIOR to start ripping out various programs including AV's, antispyware, firewall, etc. If your friend doesn't know if he has a recent backup or not, or he gives you a blank stare and says "what's a backup?"; it's time to do one!! Also, lots of AV's don't remove properly so make sure to remove in SAFE MODE if possible.

4. FYI, I think your wording is confused; the C: drive may hold the Recovery or Restore partition, but not the other way around. If he has a desktop, he may have a 2nd or 3rd internal or external hard drive; and sometimes those partitions can be installed on another physical hard drive (such as Drive1, Drive2; not Drive0--C: drive). Win10 won't mess with most factory partitions from what I've seen. On my Sony laptop, I have only 1 internal hdd, and it had Win7 on it previously with a factory Recovery partition installed for Vista. Win10 upgrade ignored that partition, and it's still there. The rollback program Microsoft has given everyone must be applied within 30 days of the upgrade. I have yet to test this. Several people have tried it with very unpredictable results. This is Microsoft's usual panacea--if you don't like Win10 or you can't figure out how to make it work or how to use it, just rollback to your previous version of Windows! LOL. That's incredibly obtuse IMO.

5. You didn't say which version of Windows your friend was attempting to upgrade from (Win7/8/8.1); it would certainly be helpful to know this (along with the make/model of the computer as i mention above). Was it done via Internet or a Clean Install method (DVD or USB)? I would suggest you attempt to rollback his system to whatever Windows came on that machine originally--that you can get to using the built-in Recovery Partition on the hard drive, say Win7; then download and run the Win10 Upgrade Assistant. Remove all non-WX compliant drivers and programs per instructions from the Upgrade Assistant. Then ensure you've unplugged ALL USB or Firewire devices plugged into your friend's computer, and continue the Upgrade if you go the online method. If you Clean Install, make sure to do this too; as it could easily be one of your friend's peripherals like a printer/scanner/camera hanging up the WX upgrade!! Especially if it's older than 5 yrs. and the drivers are too old to work with WX.

6. You can also try a Windows repair at this point. Open up an Admin Command Prompt, and run CHKDISK /F on the C: boot drive. If it can't run to completion, your Windows is hosed and needs to be reinstalled.

7. If CHKDSK works; go back and open up another Admin Command Prompt and run: SFC/SCANNOW; you may be familiar with this one; it can take several hours especially if your friend's hard drive is larger than 750GB in size; it has to complete 5 stages including several reboots. If it runs to completion, it will fix any corrupted or missing Windows system files. I would do this on the factory installed version of Windows (Win7/8/8.1) prior to re-attempting the upgrade. After running Windows repairs in #6 & here in #7; see if the upgrade to WinX works. If it doesn't you'll have to perform the other upgrade steps; and a Windows reset most likely.

Best of luck,
<<<BIGBEARJEDI>>>

Just remember my motto; "Win10 upgrades won't fix pre-existing problems on any computer; if the computer wasn't running healthy on the earlier version of Windows; the upgrade won't fix everything!".

 

[bochane]

Hello my 'bigbearded' friend,

Fortunately, I never ever start an upgrade without having a systemcopy and repair disk.
And today I restored to the W7 that it was before any upgrade attempt.

We have some time, and W7 is certainly not the end of the world in the case we are unable to upgrade.

In the meantime I will read and reread your advice and will surely follow it.
There were some difficulties with malware in the past, and you and also I don't trust that Comodo.

An option I see is go back to an as clean as possible factory (QMotion) installed W7, upgrade it to the current W7 and upgrade to W10 and even than there is only a change on success and no garantee.

I will come back when I know more and that may take a while.....
Thanks again for your very usefull advice

Henk

 

[BIGBEARJEDI]

Sure thing, Henk. Remember, I recommend that you attempt a "CLEAN INSTALL" on your next attempt to upgrade Win7 to WX. Disconnect any and all USB & firewire peripheral devices for BOTH OS installs to prevent driver/hardware conflicts.

Let us know how it turns out--if & when you try to upgrade to WX again!
Cheers!
<<<BBJ>>>

 

[bochane]

Hi my "Bigbearded" friend,

I succeeded the upgraded completed.
The key was to disconnect a 2nd hard disk (used for backup...).

I also checked whether the processor (Q8400) and BIOS/motherboard (N15235 - G31MXP) supported NX, PAE and SSE2 and MaxCPUID had been disabled.

Thanks for all your most valuable advice!!

Henk

 

[BIGBEARJEDI]

Hi Henk,

That's really great news! It's such a simple thing, we often overlook it. Interesting, that on the most recent v1511, b10586.14 update I did on my Dell Studio540 desktop PC yesterday, I left 2 of my 3 external usb drives plugged in to see how the upgrade would be affected. The upgrade did hang after it ran, and it required a reboot. The 2nd 1TB MyPassport WD external drive I just bought last month, and the upgrade ran through a mandatory checkdisk process which took an hour or two. Being a new drive, it probably didn't need that, and if I would have disconnected it prior to running the W10 upgrade, that checkdisk probably wouldn't have been required. But, I wanted to see what would happen. I did copy of lot of Customer backups and backup images to it, and filled it to about 80% of capacity. After re-reading my own post, of course, this was not unexpected. However, with people whose external hdd's are say 3-5 yrs. old, and they've never run maintenance on them, and leave them plugged in during the upgrade, they may crash the upgrade, and not return the checkdisk opportunity to "clean-up" the indexes and hash tables on that external drive properly. That would most likely hang the upgrade program as it did with mine, (I actually got a CMOS Checksum error!), or totally scramble the upgrade.

I've done about 3 W10 upgrades on Customer machines now in the last 3 months, and at least 2 of those were caused by this same problem I believe. Non-professional Techs aka "home-users" are just not aware of this issue; especially with the Offer being widely publicized in Media mostly on TV by Microsoft, they see this as a 1-click upgrade that they can complete in an hour or two, and go on about their business. As you are aware on this forum and other forums online, this is not the case. And not the only problem the upgrades have. I had 2 software programs (TrendMicro's RUBotted security program, and 8gadgetpak) reported as incompatible, and the upgrade program forced me to remove them prior to the upgrade program being able to continue it's process. The RUBotted program could not be reinstalled after the Nov. upgrade (TH2--or ThresHold2), but the 8gadetpak was successfully reinstalled after. The RUBotted program was running perfectly fine on v1511, b10240, installed about 2 weeks ago. This same program had difficulties with TP versions 10049 and up all the way until July 29th RTM (v1511, b10240) until vendor (TrendMicro) finally updated the program to be compatible with W10.

Best,
Marc = <<<BBJ>>>