Woe is me

My previous Win 8.1 laptop is the one I have wired to my router for speedtests and the like. (I mentioned a week or so ago in this forum it was Vista, having forgotten I swapped them because some thinkbroadband software wouldn't run well under Vista).

When I made that earlier post it was because a Windows icon had appeared in the system tray. As far as I remember I had never asked for notification or anything. I simply hid the icon.

Reading the ongoing threads here I went to look at the directory tree for c:\. Lo and behold I had the $Windows.~BT. A couple of directories, 3.nnGB.

Next day I had another look and there was more, including several files. The bottom one of which was setup.exe. Then .... Aahhhhhh!

As I coasted the cursor across to the tree list to check the overall size, I must have accidentally clicked setup.exe. It started downloading like mad.

Failing to manage to commit suicide, in the end I killed the download process through Task Manager, resolving to steer clear of that directory for a long time. I do not want to update that machine to Win 10 at this point in time. It does everything I want, and I don't want anything to fail due to drivers or whatever.

That I think was Saturday.

This evening I went to run a ttb speedtest and saw a new icon I've never seen before. Hover - "Restart your machine to complete the install". No indication of what I was about to install. Right-clicking didn't help.

Check the directory again and a load more stuff, with several new sub-directories modified today between 17:00 and 17:20. It's sitting there now in that state.

/me = idiot!

/Microsoft - utter PITA!! Why did they push the damn thing in the first place?

As I see it, I have two options.

1) Reboot tomorrow and waste a lot of time making sure I sort out any options offered. Hope all is well at the end.

2) Rename (which probably would not make any difference) or copy elsewhere the contents of the directory, or at least the most necessary-looking sub-directory. Reboot and see if my existing system lives.

Any ideas and advice please folks?

I have a feeling you wont have much luck doing anything. Your old system should be in windows.old. However, you don't know whether anything else important outside that has been modified.

You could always try a windows 8 system recovery if your other ideas don't work out. If they don't and you cant to a system recovery, then it may be time for a re-installation.

You might find the next reboot starts the install process.

Is there a path to that please? It isn't anywhere obvious.

It could be that it is created after I reboot, as all that seems to have happened so far is the main download. No messages or confirmation request at all.

What worries me about a reboot is as I clearly haven't gone via the expected entry point I don't know if anything should have run before setup.exe.

Its usually c:\windows.old

If its not there, then it looks like nothing major has occurred (the upgrade hasn't started) - its possible nothing much will happen on a reset, in which case you may be alright

Ummm. You know this, or you are guessing?

My guess/worry is that if I reboot setup.exe will create that directory and carry on into the upgrade, out of my control until I get to set any options. By which time things will be in a right mess.

Edited by RobertoS (Tue 04-Aug-15 14:42:17)

I wouldn't recommend deleting or hacking stuff when it is potentially part way through doing something. At some point you will need to reboot. If it does do the upgrade then there is an option to roll back. My guess is that it has installed a standard windows update rather than win 10 as the win 10 installs I have done it doesn't reboot before doing obvious work for the upgrade.

So, either reboot and see what happens or start deleting stuff and risk borking windows when it may not even be doing the win 10 update anyway.

Of course, you have a full backup in case anything does go wrong?

Full file backup, not disk image. A new disk image right now would of course be useless, as there will be registry settings in place for after the reboot.

I'm sure it is the Win10 anyway. Quite apart from the coincidence of a further download starting as I moved the cursor across the Win Explorer screen and am fairly sure must have "touchpad-tapped" over setup.exe, and that download re-starting itself some time yesterday after I killed it on Sunday, the System Tray icon has appeared telling me to restart to complete and the squashed rectangles Win10 icon (which I had hidden and is what you should start from) has gone.

Plus, if your theory is correct about a possible Win8.1 update, then disabling the Win10 downloaded directory wouldn't cause any problems .

I expect I'll end up restarting and see what happens . New OS is empty at the moment. But there is an autorun.ini that does a couple of settings, and probably hasn't been invoked due to going straight into setup.exe.

Does vista schedule restarts?

It's Win 8.1, see the OP .

Then it will reboot if you like it or not.

In reply to a post by ian72:

So, either reboot and see what happens or start deleting stuff and risk borking windows when it may not even be doing the win 10 update anyway.

I decided to see what happened, so clicked to Restart. Very weird from then on.

First it gave me a previously never seen message about some processes running, so wait. Then it continued with the "Restarting" blue screen.

Next the screen went blank, as normal, followed by the ASUS splash page coming up. That hung around for a bit, then I got the stage 1 desktop screen with the shortcuts and so on, plus most of the Taskbar stuff. At this point the disc drive was going like the clappers, and the clock in the System Tray stopped. Netmeter window had come up, but zilch happening in it.

Cursor arrow very occasionally did the rotating circle, and when moved to the taskbar immediately circled. Nothing clickable.

That stayed the same for around 7 minutes, with a couple of blankings and reinstatements of the entire taskbar!

Ultimately refreshed the desktop a couple of times and now seems to be normal.

Nothing appears to have altered in the $Windows.~BT directory, including the timestamps.

The squashed rectangles Get Win10 icon has re-appeared amongst the hidden ones!

A totally strange episode, taking about 20 minutes from clicking the "Restart to complete the install".

Thanks to all for their suggestions. At least I can turn the darn thing off now without worrying about what will happen when I turn it on . Or can I !?!! . We shall see.

The danger of touch pads, I've never liked them, use a mouse wherever possible.

Yes, I've been caught a few times.

I used to turn off the click function of the pad itself, but my last two laptops including the one that I just had the panic about have been touch-screen. Turn of the pad-click and you lose the touchscreen .

I think there is a slight difference between the ASUS and this Dell as to what gets disabled, but in both cases it defeats the object of having a touch-screen.

If it does upgrade to Windows 10 you have 30 days to uninstall back to your original OS. It saves the old version in c:\windows.old. After 30 days windows will delete the option. It's called Windows Rollback.
Rolling back is as simple as opening the Settings menu, choosing Update and Security, then picking the Recovery option. Choose Go Back to Windows 8.1 / 7, depending on your original operating system, and Windows will begin the rollback procedure.
Do a search on Google for "Windows Rollback" to get more info.

Brilliant Roger . Thanks a lot.

You've probably now seen the issue has gone away, but I've been considering doing the actual upgrade to see what it's like and how it copes with various things I do on my main laptop. That's why in the end I bit the bullet and restarted just before 7 this evening. I wasn't aware of the roll-back facility.

I'd like to upgrade, but it's early days for something so major. I've been in the business longer than most on these forum have been alive, and early adopters easily come a cropper. But from what you say I shall probably go ahead on Thursday. Something I keep trying to get done I have a chance of tomorrow.

One thing I've observed is that Microsoft roll-backs normally work . Apart from System Restore.

The target machine isn't critical except for the various flavours of thinkbroadband speedtests. IIRC, (possibly not! I may be thinking of tbbMeter), one doesn't yet work properly/at all under Win10.

I want the HTML5 HTTP single-streamer working on 13 August when I move away from Plusnet, and I can't use this machine as in my eagerness for a decent SSD-only laptop I didn't spot this one doesn't have Ethernet! D'oh! (I'd have bought it anyway, but it was a shock).

Edited by RobertoS (Tue 04-Aug-15 21:38:36)

I've upgraded 6 PCs of different specs from 8.1 to Windows 10 so far and all but one went without a hitch. The odd one generated the error "unable to update the system reserved partition" during the early part. That was due to the system reserved partition only being 100mb. Easily fixed using the free Aoemi Partition Assistant to increase it to 350mb. Windows 8/8.1 always used that size but Windows 7 used 100mb. Can always check it 1st using Windows disk management. As long as it wasn't an upgrade from Windows 7, it will be ok.

That's interesting about Windows 7 Reserved partition, my 2 W7 systems are of course 100MB, a useful tip to increase them to 400MB (or so) beforehand.

When you got the error message did the upgrade fail, giving you the chance to increase the partition or what?

It just terminated the upgrade during the initial checks and then rolled back the few things that it has already started. Didn't cause any problems. I then used Aomei to decrease the front end of the C drive by approx 350mb and extended the system partition by the same amount. Restarted the upgrade and away it went. Looking on the web it seems that this is not an unusual problem and also occurred on Win 8 upgrades from Win7. Strange MS didn't find away to resize the partition automatically during the upgrade! There are going to be many non technical users who wouldn't know or understand how to resize it. Not a task for the faint hearted if you are not IT savvy.

I've changed partition sizes several times on this particular PC, I'm not overly concerned about doing it again.

I was thinking more of the general public. Pretty sure most who regularly use TBB are more technicaly savvy than the average user.

Ummm. You know this, or you are guessing?

I know a lot of things - you need to be more specific!
If its regarding windows.old, then yes, I do know it. If its regarding the other thing, then its an educated guess; mainly as I didn't much around with the ~BT directory

There was one other issue I forgot about. Windows 10 doesn't download and install the NVidia drivers and defaults to the Microsoft Basic Drivers with limited resolutions. You have to download them manually from NVidia. Not a big deal but annoying. Apparently there is a conflict between Windows update and the NVidia drivers system.

It was "the other thing". But see this post if you haven't already . All sorted.

Thanks Roger. I'll check what it has ....

Bog standard Intel HD Graphics 3000. A cheap machine bought in a hurry but served its purpose .

This one's a bit better in general. Radeon R7 M270 and Intel HD Graphics 5500. (Why both? Video cards aren't my hunting ground).

In reply to a post by rogerfp:

There was one other issue I forgot about. Windows 10 doesn't download and install the NVidia drivers and defaults to the Microsoft Basic Drivers with limited resolutions. You have to download them manually from NVidia. Not a big deal but annoying. Apparently there is a conflict between Windows update and the NVidia drivers system.

This may have changed recently because my copy did download the drivers and they are buggy as heck. I have gone back to 347.88 originally for win 8 and they work fine. The latest on my machine kept crashing and recovering, the win 8 drivers are fine. I have now blocked the drivers on windows update until they fix them. Huge thread on Nvidia forums about it.

Any particular reason to use Aoemi Partition Assistant rather than the Windows 7 Disc Management interface to change partition sizes?

I've used these without a problem, just wondering if there was a special reason to use Aoemi?

There are plenty of partition software utilities that will do the job. Aoemi is free,easy to use and works well. Unless I missed something, the built Windows Disk management is unable to change the System Reserved partition size at the beginning of a drive. Can't see any way off doing it. Windows disk management is very basic. I guess MS don't want users blaming them when they mess up their OS by playing around with anything other than basic functions.
Update:-
Having rechecked it, the problem is that Windows Disk Management is unable to free up space at the beginning of the drive, where the System Reseved partion is located. Therefore is unable to extend the System Reserved partition. Other partition software is able to do this.

Edited by deleted (Wed 05-Aug-15 12:55:34)