Windows Update woes

[Cool Buddy]

I have just spent a whole day trying to update from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 and ended up with Windows 8 on my laptop! Please bear with the long question.

My laptop, which I had previously updated to Windows 8.1, had slowed down considerably and it was also not showing the upgrade app for windows 10. The C drive was also quite full and I though I might not be able to install Windows 10 without emptying it. So I reset the laptop using Windows' inbuilt reset functionality. However, after the reset, I ended up with Windows 8 on my laptop (which was expected).

So I tried installing windows 8.1 update from the store. I was told that I need to install some updates first. So I installed all available updates, which took around 3 hours. I then ran Win 8.1 update again. It downloaded in around 1 and half hours and the installation started. After a while, my laptop shut down.

When I switched it on again, I got a screen saying restoring previous version of Windows. After the restore was complete, I was shows a message saying "Upgrade to windows 8.1 failed. Your computer has been restored to previous version of Windows."

I thought since Win 8.1 has already been downloaded, I could just run the update again. But when I tried that, Win 8.1 started downloading again. Since bandwidth is not that cheap, I stopped the download.

But after all this, I noticed that my C drive, of 75 GB, has just 20 GB free space. So basically a clean install of Windows 8 is taking 55 GB of space!

Is there a way I could remove everything and directly install windows 10? Note that my laptop came with a licensed copy of Windows 8 and I would like to keep a licensed copy of Windows 10 as well.

 

[dashing.sujay]

AFAIK, if you directly install win 10 then you won't be able to activate it unless you have bought it.

The only way as of now to do is to first "upgrade" the windows update way, then clean install win 10 from any source. It'll itself activate using machine ID.

 

[Cool Buddy]

I tried using Windows 10 ISO to install windows. That didn't work, I kept getting the same error. I even tried using the Keep Nothing option during installation. It still didn't work.

Error code 0x800704B8 - 0x3001A
The installation failed in the FIRST_BOOT phase with an error during BEGIN_FIRST_BOOT operation

Finally I reset my win 8 once again, hoping that that would solve the problem. But that compounded the problem as now I am unable to boot into my laptop even.

Now I am only left with the clean install option. I hope that will work and I will at least be able to run win 10 on my laptop. I don't care about the license anymore.

If the only purpose of the license is to make the life of the user harder, then I don't care about the license. All this could have been easily avoided had microsoft simply allowed a clean install with my product key. While the pirates are rejoicing with their KMS activated Win 10, I am stuck with a barely functional laptop because I have made the mistake of paying microsoft for their software.