Getting Windows 11 24H2 to install
• 2 min read
I updated my laptop to Windows 11 24H2 without problem (albeit using the Windows 11 Installation Assistant, as Windows Update wasn’t offering it).
It was a different story on my desktop, however. Whether the update was attempted through Windows Update or Installation Assistant, the installation would get relatively far along and then fail and roll back.
The failure would occur after rebooting, just after when progress reaches 66%. Windows would then reboot again (I get the impression this reboot was not intended). Just as the installation resumes, my PC would shut down and reboot again. That would repeat once more, and then the installation would start rolling back.
(None of those last three reboots sounded healthy: my PC would click, and my speakers would emit a thud.)
When the installation was attempted through Windows Update, it would report
error 0xc1900101. I ran
SetupDiag
to try and get more detail about the failure. It reported the following:
Error: 0xc1900101-0x40017 SetupDiag reports rollback failure found.
Last Phase = Post First Boot
Last Operation = Ensure suspended services are stopped
Error = 0xC1900101-0x40017(Incidentally, SetupDiag refused to do anything unless I provided the /Verbose
argument.)
Sadly, while SetupDiag gave me a better error code, it didn’t tell me anything I could act on, and I only found red herrings in the logs.
Nonetheless, I spent some time fiddling around uninstalling old drivers using DriverStoreExplorer, getting rid of some VMWare virtual network adaptors, and trying other vague things I found suggested online. None of those helped.
Today, though, I did two new things:
- disabled a bunch of old, unneeded drivers using Autoruns
- fixed a problem with a network card I had installed not having Secure Boot-compliant firmware
After doing those things, I tried the installation again. It finally completed without problem. (I didn’t watch the whole process, but it also seemed to complete more quickly after rebooting as well.)
I’m more inclined to believe it was a driver causing the installation failure (rather than the Secure Boot compliance problem). I won’t know which specific driver it was now, but at least this post gives anyone else encountering the same error some additional things to check and try.