Well I'm making some progress anyway.

I marked the Windows partition as active in Disk Management, then found the computer wouldn't boot, so used the repair options on the Windows 10 installation DVD that I'd made previously (any Windows disk would have done) to put Windows back on the MBR, using a combination of the bootrec commands in Command Prompt and the start-up repair option.

Now the computer boots straight into Windows 8.1, and Windows Update is now happily downloading the Windows 10 upgrade, which it wouldn't before.
Whether it'll carry on and do the upgrade now remains to be seen.
Yes, I could have saved the downloading and used the installation disk to upgrade, but by the time I remembered that WU was already downloading.

I've temporarily lost access to the Linuxes, but I know how to reinstall grub to get them back, once I'm sure Windows 10 is installed and working.
Or I might use EasyBCD to add them to the Windows boot (might save future hassle?)

Why this computer insisted that Windows was on the MBR and the other one didn't is a mystery?
Still think it might be something to do with the UEFI BIOS, although it's not being used as such.

A review of the Asus E5 laptop on qvc uk and the tech guys view and demo on windows 10, they mentioned it was the first device offered by QVC that’s pre-loaded with Windows 10, video of the programme here.

Just in conclusion, Windows 10 is now installed and working fine on that recalcitrant PC, so the bootloader was indeed the problem.

Just annoyed that I had to jump through hoops to get it upgraded.
And Windows didn't even have the decency of telling me which hoops it wanted me to jump through, only giving me obscure error codes. Which I think is ridiculous in this day and age.


Strangely it's allocated a drive letter to the 100MB system reserved partition.
Haven't seen that before on any of my PCs?

Its a bit unrealistic to expect windows to be able to handle your situation, as it is not routine.

Remove drive letter from system partition to hide it to avoid accidentally doing something stupid to it.

Are the boot files the same between W8.1 and W10?

ie Now the upgrade has been successful, if you set System Reserved back to Active, is your multiboot Linuxes and Windows back to normal?

(be sure you have access to Command Prompt/Diskpart in Advanced Startup Tools on HDD or via Windows Boot Install or Recovery Media or MiniTool Partition Wizard Bootable, to change it back, in case you can't boot again)

=-=-=-=

That may be useful for when Dual or Multiboot gets broken in future, restoring a System Image of just the System Reserved partition, nice and quick, would fix it

=-=-=-=

Also, access to Repair options can be awkward sometimes.

Legacy mode can be useful (F8 works again, but it does slow boot time a bit because Quick Boot cannot be used)

I don't think it's unrealistic to expect it to give a message such as
"We cannot proceed with the upgrade as Windows is currently not in control of the Bootloader. Please rectify this before trying again."

It must have known that was the situation, otherwise it wouldn't know which error code to display.

Thanks for the tip to remove the drive letter from the system reserved partition, I've just done that.
Before I did I had a look in it, but it just said "this folder is empty".



Ah, I don't have a full enough understanding of it to want to mess around too much I'm afraid.
I know enough to do certain things, but wasn't really sure what the consequences of marking the "C:" drive active would be.

When I marked that as 'active' in Windows Disk Management it also changed one of my linux partitions to "unallocated space". I checked this later with GParted, so it seems to have knocked out one of the linuxes anyway.
Strangely, although I had the linux partitions as logical partitions within an extended partition, Windows seemed to see them as "primary partitions", so perhaps it thought there were too many of them?

So do you think setting the Windows partition to active, means the computer effectively ignores the 100MB system reserved partition when booting, and setting it back to active might just restore the situation as before?
That might be why it allocated it a drive letter?

As I say, I don't really want to try it, plus I've already repartitioned the drive with GParted to allow just one linux alongside Windows, and I'm going to try to use EasyBCD to add that linux (haven't decided which yet) to the Windows bootloader. Failing that I'll go back to using Grub, and hope that any future Windows 10 upgrades don't cause a similar situation.

I notice that the first PC (that upgraded without problem) doesn't have the 100MB partition at the start of the drive, but has a 350MB partition at the end.
The one with the 100MB partition was originally on Windows 7 before upgrade to 8, whereas the one with the 350MB partition had Windows 8 clean installed.

Recommend you make a complete disk image backup now using Macrium Reflect Free or similar - MRF backs up Linux partitions as well.

I haven't at this moment got a spare hard drive big enough to take a full system image of that computer. But it's something that I'm going to buy soon, for that very purpose.

The first PC I upgraded I did make a system image using MRF onto an 80GB drive that I have spare. But on that computer the data is on a separate drive so Windows only took up about 50GB.
On this system Windows takes up around 200GB (including data).

I am not a fan of the UI, I would much rather it stay up permanently rather than popping up and covering the top and bottom of the picture.

Plus it seemed to take a while to load, I don't know whether that is because of the Album part of the programme and the number of photos I have stored.

Windows Photo Viewer is just better suited for the way I use my computer, the same goes for most of the W10 and W8/81 apps really. If I wanted an app I would use my phone not a computer.

I do now have some more info on this, although I didn't do the experiment you suggested as such.

I installed a linux (Elementary OS) onto that computer, and installed grub to the linux partition, so it wouldn't interfere with the Windows bootloader.
I then used EasyBCD on Windows to add Elementary OS to the Windows bootloader.

If you choose Elementary from the Windows boot menu it opens up grub.
Interestingly there are two entries for Windows on the grub menu; one on the main Windows partition, and one on the 100MB system reserved partition.
If you choose the one on the main one it brings up the Windows bootloader again, where you choose between Windows and Linux. But if you choose the one on the system reserved partition it immediately starts booting Windows 10.

So I think you are right that everything in the system reserved partition is preserved.
Probably my putting "bootrec /fixmbr" into the recovery console (when I was trying to get 10 to install), got rid of the original grub and restored Windows to that, but the computer still wouldn't boot because that partition was no longer the active one.
The start-up repair utility must have fixed that.
But if I hadn't done that, the original grub would probably still be in there?

People talk about the demise of RT but I think it, or something near identical, fits in major with MS long term plans.
Simplifying apps gives them more options.

However, I even doubt Microsoft is sure what is 2 or 3 years ahead. Incredible sales of Baytrail means a majority of consumers seem happy with basic computing.

Sounds here like Cortana dislikes certain type of grammar, as the CEO unwittingly showed.
Where was his autocue?
http://m.theinquirer.net/inquirer/ne...-live-on-stage

@t=10m33s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=13&v...5sreQ#t=10m33s

Haha

I'm now imagining him saying "Show me the money!"...and SpyTana opening up an x-rated picture (House Whisperer in Spy type, if know what mean, but more ethnic)

Anyway....I still think that blue on black WX logo looks more like something you would use for a horror movie:

http://imgur.com/E569npS

Come to think of it, even the free wall paper pictures that come with WX have a disturbing "Long Weekend" (1978) vibe about them

Just a wee...ish update on the active partition problem that I was having.

Windows definitely requires that the 'C:' drive is the active partition in order to be able to upgrade to Windows 10 from either Windows 8.1 or Windows 7.

It doesn't need C: to be active to run Windows normally, and it doesn't seem to need to be in control of the bootloader (as I previously thought it might), but if C: is not the active partition it gives you the "Something happened...." error in the Media Creation tool, or the 800703ED error in WU.

So if you are getting those errors, and you have more than one partition on the disk, open up Disk Management (search "disk partitions" in Control Panel), and make sure the C: partition is marked 'active'.


How do I know this?
Because I'm today attempting to upgrade my third and final (thankfully) computer to Windows 10.

This one has Windows 7, and again dual boots with various Linuxes (controlled by grub), but there's no system reserved partition on this machine, and the Windows partition is the first partition on the drive.
I was getting the same errors as before, and found that again the C: partition wasn't the active one. It was the second partition (Linux) that was marked active for some reason.
I marked the Windows partition as active and rebooted, but this time grub still worked, as it was installed on the root of the hard drive, which this time was within the 'C:' partition.
The upgrade is now proceeding.

I took another look on the first PC that I upgraded (the one that went smoothly), and the C: partition was indeed the active one all along.

Mind you, I'm still a bit confused as to what marking a partition as 'active' actually does?
Does the BIOS look to boot from that partition?
(this suggests so)

Grub installed on the root of the drive still works, even though the first partition on the drive isn't the active one. But on the two PCs of mine that that's been the case the active partition has been the Linux partition that installed grub to the root of the drive.
So I guess when a Linux partition is 'active' it must point the boot to where grub is actually installed, which by default is the root of the drive (but can be changed).

How embarrassing! Hilarious!
I asked Cortana the same, love her response

Seems that if other humans can't understand your 'woice' commands Cortana can't understand you either! Who knew?

"Show me th- my most atrisk opportunities."

Umm.. no?

Your systems are demanding C: is Active (ie nominated as the Boot Partition) maybe because they have been modified for dual booting and at some point you, or an auto tool, found that to work.

It is not a general rule. W10 upgrades quite happily on most systems with System Reserved set as Active.

But if strange errors happen, changing C: to Active is a valid idea to try. It can always be changed back.

Note that BitLocker drive encryption, for those who use it, insists on System Reserved being present and Active. There may be other scenarios too, but I'm not sufficiently knowledgable.

In my travails on the Insider Program, since January, I noticed on my various installs, and messing about, that sometimes W10 Preview would not use my System Reserved partition, when I reinstalled.

I found that the way to ensure it, was to Clean Install from Unallocated Space, after deleting System Reserved and C:, when the W10 Install USB asked "Where do you want to install Windows"

I was messing about because I was looking at why there were problems and it turned out W8/8.1/10, generally, require a 500MB partition but if you have an older 100MB-200MB partition, it is not enlarged and causes problems.

Installing to Unallocated allows Windows to do exactly what it needs then.

Obviously, any Linux boot setup would need to be recreated afterwards.


What is the System Reserved Partition and Can You Delete It?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boot_flag

Note that I am not advising you must have it. If the system works, just file away the issues for a future time

Just been having issues with Windows Update. I'm sure that automatically installing updates without any sort of user intervention might have made some sort of sense to someone at Microsoft but it's no fun when it breaks your system as a result.

Last night as I was using the laptop I noticed the WiFi indicator had changed from Blue (ON) to Orange (OFF). Thinking I may have accidentally pressed the button I tried to turn it back on, but it wouldn't.

Device manager claimed the WiFi adapter (Realtek RTL8188EE) was all working properly even though it very obviously wasn't. Tried the old trick of uninstalling and reinstalling but no joy. Even ticked the box to delete the driver files. Turns out Windows Update had tried and failed to install new drivers and it was these broken drivers that it insisted on using. I also managed to find what claimed to be Realtek drivers for the WiFi adapter and tried them. They seemed to install OK and restored WiFi (was using an ethernet cable to do this). But Windows went and overwrote the drivers with the broken ones so no WiFi again!

Only way to wrestle control back was do a System Restore to before the drivers installed. That did seem to work, initially at least. Was OK for the rest of the evening and for a couple of hours this evening. But then of course the WiFi indicator turned Orange again without warning! Windows had detected that "new" drivers were available and installed them, once again breaking the WiFi.

So back to System Restore then a bit of internet trawling which through up this from Microsoft

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3073930

Downloaded and ran the tool Show or Hide Updates Troubleshooter and used it to hide the Realtek WiFi driver update. Time will tell if it works. But why is this tool not a standard part of Windows?

Rolling back the driver in Device Manager would have been the first thing I tried, and then hiding the update.

Unfortunately the Roll back option was not available for whatever reason. The only options in Device Manager were Uninstall or Update. But all Uninstall did was revert back to the broken drivers, whether I let Windows re-install them itself or tried to download replacements from the internet. Update simply claimed I already had the latest drivers.

And until I downloaded that Troubleshooter tool there was no obvious way to hide any updates. Or if there is a way built into Windows 10 as standard I couldn't find it.

New Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 10547
http://blogs.windows.com/bloggingwin...w-build-10547/

Improvements to Start.
Bigger tile groups in Start and more tiles in Start.
Improvements to Tablet mode.
Disable the Windows background picture in the sign-in screen.
Text input panel improvements.
App updates.
A/V updates for Edge.
You can now use Cortana with local accounts as well as with a Microsoft account.
A number of bug fixes.

Interesting change..

That's interesting to know.
Previously I've always partitioned the drive myself with GParted, but if I have to clean install Windows in the future I'll do it to unallocated space instead.

I've got one computer that has a 100MB partition at the beginning of the drive, that had Windows 7 clean installed.
One computer that has a 350MB partition at the end of the drive, that had Windows 8 clean installed (presumably it put it at the end as that was where it found unallocated space?).
And one computer that has no system reserved partition, that started out with Windows XP, and has been upgraded to Windows 7 and now Windows 10.
All seem to be working fine at the moment.

Mind you, I'm still stuck in the era of legacy BIOS partitioning. I'll really need to get my head around the new GUID system for my next computer build (if there is one).

I Installed Windows 10x64 Home and glad I did my laptop runs faster, it does not freeze and the reason being.
I uninstalled IE11 completely from my laptop and use Edge Browser only.
I Can go straight to the web sites I want by adding them to Favourites Bar, once on there just press the website you want and go straight to it.
When I had IE11 it kept crashing or flashing up (sorry but internet explorer has hit a problem and needs to close.
Also when first starting up from pressing the button to getting on line with IE11 used to take 5-6 Mins.
Since removing it and only using the Edge Browser it now takes 2mins 30 seconds I have used stop watch on it with 2 other people witnessing it.
Also my printer which is wifi does not keep going off line like it did and works better and faster.
So I for one am very happy with the whole package, and will never go back to windows 8.1 which was good if IE11 had of been more stable and not make my laptop freeze up as well.
will keep members posted on progress

I had a Total Windows freeze/lock-up last night.

Not unusual, from time to time, but the Taskbar Tray Clock stopped. I've never seen that before.

Hard power off and on. All normal today.