Patch Lady – getting 1709 TO install

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While everyone else is wanting to keep 1709 at bay, I was wanting to get it to install on a small 32 gig hard drive. I had previously tried a usb flas
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Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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Great Lake Bunyip, Ascaris, WildBill, woody

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patch lady – When I attached an SD to a PC or Mac, I typically got different results — 1) SD – slot in the computer ; 2) single SD-reader ;  3) Multi-card (typically 5-slot) reader.
On some, works as “expected”; some — will not write ; others —  always will write ,  even if “locked”.  SD-“Lock”  appears to be a soft(ware) “Lock”.  Ancient thumb-drives appear to have a Hard(ware) Lock.

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I can confirm that the slider “lock” on an SDHC card doesn’t control the card at all, but relies on the host to obey the setting.  I have two multi-slot SD-to-USB adaptors;  one does support the lock setting, the other doesn’t, therefore the SD card is always writable (and it’s fairly obvious why — the card doesn’t enter into the adaptor slot far enough for the lock slider to be detected at all).

HMcF.  Win7 Pro 64 bit.

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Heh!, usually when I do want to use the lock, just inserting the micro card adapter unlocks it. 🙂

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Congratulations Miss. Susan – if only all the feature updates were smooth,  everyone would want to install them right away.

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Hello, I would like to add that reason for this behavior is “removable bit” – you can google it

It setting if drive firmware according to which windows determine if drive is removable or fixed. On some flash drive you can flip it and change that.

This is also importovat for Windows to GO drives – removable bit must be off.

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Thanks for sharing your experience, Susan.

If you are like me and you DO want 1709 to install, you have a hard drive tight on space and you are having issues, go get a usb external hard drive and see if that does the trick.

And that external USB hard drive can move nicely thereafter into a role where it can be used for backup.

By the way, I will be interested in hearing your experience getting v1709 updated with the latest patches. I had no problems getting my v1709 setup to 16299.125 back when the updates for that came out, but then tremendous trouble getting it to 16299.251. I finally accomplished the latter by doing something Microsoft explicitly said not to do, which gave me quite a chuckle – though it did not surprise me.

-Noel

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What issues did you have?  I’m not seeing issues on my machines.

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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Glad to hear it’s working for you. Treasure it.

After 16299.125 my setup would simply no longer detect any available updates, and when I would try to update it using an .msu from the Microsoft catalog it would get to a very nearly complete percentage (96%) then emit the following dumbed down status message…

You might wonder whether it’s something I did to the system, but I even tried restoring 16299.0 (which had subsequently self-updated to 16299.125 successfully before) and even it wouldn’t update either. Something about the latest update is at odds with my system I think, though Microsoft doesn’t make information available about specifically what went wrong that even a fairly capable person can find. By the way, this is a perfectly legitimate license for Win 10 I have been running since before the very first RTM. No trouble keeping it up to date, and even the in-place upgrades went fairly well at first.

This time, to get it to update to 16299.251, I ended up turning off the system when it got to 96% complete – exactly what it says not to do – then the update stuck. Now it passes SFC and DISM checks no problem, and shows 16299.251.

I had a v1703 setup get into this state as well late in 2017, then I was able to bring it up to v1709 using the ISO released by Microsoft. This is not proving to be a confidence builder in Microsoft’s ability to manage my system as a service.

I go all the way back with Microsoft software and I’m used to having my Windows systems run for YEARS without trouble. I have a Win 8.1 system that’s been running without faults since its initial install in 2013. This policy of having to reinstall Windows every 6 months is leading Microsoft down unsustainable paths.

-Noel

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HiFlyer, Elly

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Maybe the USB flash-drive and SD card could not be used by the Win 10 upgrade process because they were no partition with free space in them.
Most external USB hard-drives that are in use, have already been partitioned with some free space.

If so, the USB flash-drive and SD card have to be first partitioned to an appropriate size(eg 10GB) by using a Disk Partitioning Tool, eg GParted, Aomei, EaseUS, Magic Partition, etc …
https://www.lifewire.com/free-disk-partition-software-tools-2624950

The OS cannot mount a new USB flash-drive or SD card that is unpartitioned or without any partition. Additionally, the created partition should have some free space.

Creating a Windows Install USB or Recovery USB or Live Linux USB flash-drive is different, ie the media creation tool will auto-partition the USB flash-drive before writing to it.

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Great Lake Bunyip

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It’s been awhile since I had issues. But I know some have complained that Microsoft’s Creation tool and install creator has issues with some USB drives. I had a couple of SanDisk one’s that Creator tool would not even recognize a while back. My old HP Netbook Stream had issue with capacity too even with USB creator drive so I ended up using yet another USB drive as a external storage expansion drive so the internal drive could make room for the updates. This seemed way too complicated for many users and I wonder why Microsoft never thought that through very well? I noticed they have since convinced PC makers to increase the capacity of these drives some.

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Keyword in your sentence is “some”. I think the new ultrabooks out now have 64GB storage. Don’t think Microsoft/HP thought the whole “how small can we make the hard drive size” thing through when they came out with those computers. Windows operating systems are getting larger, not smaller

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Could it be that the flash drive and the SD card don’t work, and the external USB HDD does work, because flash drives and SD cards are typically formatted as FAT (which has a 4GB file size limit) while the HDD is in NTFS format?

 

Keep Running Windows 7 Safely for Years to Come  
Make Windows 10 look and work like Windows 7

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Great Lake Bunyip, Microfix

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That’s a VERY good point.  What is the size of the largest WORKING file during a feature upgrade from 1703 to 1709?  Is something bigger than 4GB?

HMcF.

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I tried it with the flash drive formatted as NTFS.  Still didn’t work.

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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Microfix, Great Lake Bunyip

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HMcF here. Thank you for your reply.

In response, I took a brand-new 32GB SDHC card from the packet (formatted as-new as FAT32) and did a full format (not “Quick”) to NTFS.  Then I ran one of my experimental programs, which tries to write a 10GB binary file byte-by-byte (this was a previous concern of mine in a different context).  At 10GB the program appeared to halt as expected (this is in a Win7 Command Prompt box) but wouldn’t give me back the command prompt, and trying to close the cmd box by the red X didn’t work either.

This scenario has worked for the internal NTFS drive in the past.  So the external, SDHC, drive behaves differently.  Bizarre.

 

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Yes, this is very interesting indeed, and definitely a head-scratcher. Theoretically, a USB flash drive and a USB hard drive should be the same, and the OS shouldn’t care how the data is physically stored (in flash chips or on spinning rust), ignoring things like 512 byte vs 4KB sector support.

I ran into a similar issue in December 2017. A friend asked me to install Windows 10 1709 on a newly-purchased Early-2015 MacBook Air. He wanted the thin-and-light design of the MacBook Air, but needed Windows for specific applications.

After configuring macOS for Boot Camp mode, I put the ISO on a USB flash drive and attempted to install Windows 10. However, for some strange reason the setup process couldn’t see the Mac’s SSD and the installation would fail. I fought with the issue for hours, trying different flash drives, re-downloading the ISO, pre-formatting the SSD, and other tricks. It was all hopeless.

On a hunch, I ditched the USB flash drive and put the ISO on an older external hard drive. Voila! No further issues and I was able to fully install 1709.

In other cases, it seems that Windows 10 can be picky about USB 3.0 devices. If the installation media is USB 3.0, try a USB 2.0 device instead.

Something to keep in mind for future Windows 10 installations.

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jelson, Great Lake Bunyip, Microfix

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Looks like Susan found another windows bug. 🙂

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Microfix

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I have used rufus https://rufus.akeo.ie/ for years and found it to be simple and  easy to use for windows

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Microfix

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Sounds like Windows Update intelligently looks for a drive with sufficient space for doing the update. Let’s give Microsoft credit for that, although it is unconscionable for them to allow such a small drive in the first place for Windows 10.

Does Microsoft state clearly that an external drive is needed whenever updates are to be done? If they would state that clearly prior to the time of purchase, then I suppose we could give them credit for that as well, but I’m wavering on this point.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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I’ve been researching, because a family member is looking for an inexpensive computer…

Actually, glad to have the heads up on this, because the only other place I find information about needing an external drive are in the reviews or comments for a particular product. I read specific product information on sites like Amazon, Best-Buy and Wal-Mart. It might admit that it does only simple computing tasks, or only runs a few programs at a time, but there is nothing about its ability to update. According to the reviews surprising number of these devices are dead within a few months. If within a warranty period, they are returned. If not, they are usually tossed. I’m wondering how many people had a W10 update fail, and don’t know how to recover their system. I wouldn’t buy a computer and then think I had to buy an external drive, just to update it. Someone at that price point is trying to spend as little as possible (often because they have little to spend)… and it is unconscionable to sell the unknowing something that isn’t really going to work as is without stating that up front… but to not have it anywhere in the specs is downright evil.

Non-techy Win 10 Pro and Linux Mint experimenter

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satrow

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I recommend that you don’t go lower than 128 GB on the hard drive size. 64 GB is the bare minimum, but with a drive that small you have to do some gymnastics here and there. 32 GB is out of the question – way too small.

On RAM, don’t go lower than 4 GB. 4 GB will be slow sometimes, but it is workable. But 8 GB of RAM is a better minimum than 4 GB; it gives you plenty of “elbow room” for whatever you are running. This is especially important if you are running any virtual machines, because each virtual machine needs its own chunk of memory — the more VMs you run at the same time, the more RAM the computer will need to have.

If you have 32-bit Windows, you could manage with 2 GB of RAM (it would be slow, but workable); but 32-bit Windows could make use of just over 3 GB, so if you could get 3 GB, that would be better.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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Elly

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