Windows 10 anniversary update woes

[Millennium]

well at the end of September I decided that it would be fun to try the Windows 10 anniversary update from within Windows Update on my previous Win10 system. It was out a couple of weeks and I needed to try it sometime.

Bad mistake. Firstly, (and I will admit this is a system that was updated from Windows 8.0) I had to resize the boot (?) partition from 256mb to around 500mb for the update to even try. There are instructions all over the internet for this, and a lot of people have come across it, so I didn't think this would pose an update problem. Hell was I wrong, the windows update failed and gave me an obscure error code (which I did google, no help there) and so I thought it had rolled back nicely and I would still have a working system.

Nope, one reboot later and windows is only going into recovery mode. Annoyed, I tried every recovery option (from the least to most destructive) and NOTHING worked. I had no chance of getting my Win10 system back and running, as far as I could tell. This was extremely annoying as after all I had only run Windows Update on the damn thing. Everything was borked very nicely.

So, after a day or two of leaving it along thinking are there any options for me, I tried a live CD to get my data back. Ubuntu? Nope, reboot during loading (probably a Z170 thing). Some other recovery Linux live cd? Nope, no mouse and no Ethernet. Knoppix? YES, huge boot time but everything worked and my data was accessible. Once I realised it wasn't frozen during loading, that is

So I backed up what I thought was important to a USB key, and kept using Knoppix for 3-4 weeks for YouTube, reading webpages, etc. I was trying to backup the whole (dead Win10) SSD to a HDD at this time, but couldn't get it connected in my case, no idea why still now. So I went with the USB backup, bit the bullet, removed all partitions on the SSD, and installed a fresh ISO (via DVD!) of Win10 Anniversary Update on the now blank SSD.

Thankfully everything seems to be working (if sparse) now and I'm back up and running. Knoppix wasn't bad! Only thing I had to do was leave it on (the boot time was outrageous) and not have 144hz refresh during that time. Also some videos had tearing from the screen refresh, but no big deal. Probably spent £5-10 on leccy during that period, if not more. No biggie.

So, in closing, if you loose windows, try Knoppix. If you haven't tried Anniversary Update yet of Windows 10 (and my laptop still has not), backup first. And if you need to resize any partition to see Win10 update properly, realise it may just NOT WORK AT ALL.

Rant over Glad to be back!

[peterb]

Or,

Just use a hard drive installation of Knoppix (or other Linux distribution of your choice) and close windows for ever!