For those who have already successfully installed Windows 10 on your computers this might not be not interesting to read but for those who reserved for the Windows 10 upgrade and are still waiting and for those who got the error shown in the screenshot below might find my incident a useful read…
First for those who successfully reserved for the free Windows 10 upgrade from Windows 7 / 8.1
If you still seeing the Get Windows 10 app icon and clicking on it just tell you have successfully reserved for the upgrade, try running the Windows update manually to force check whether Windows 10 update has come for your computer. And if that doesn’t work out, you can try downloading the Windows 10 media creation tool and then use that to download the Windows 10 upgrade version most suited to you and then burn a DVD or a bootable USB drive to upgrade from Windows 7 / 8.1. With this DVD / USB drive one can only do a FREE upgrade let’s say from Windows 8.1 Home to Windows 10 Home (32 bit) so please check the existing version and 32/64 bit needed of your existing windows installation. This DVD / USB drive can be used to entirely format and do a fresh install of Windows 10 but your existing Windows key won’t work to activate this version and you will need to buy a new key to activate Windows 10. This I found out the hard way when I was not able to upgrade using the DVD…
And for those who are stuck with the error 0xc1900101 – 0x20004…
And if you are stuck with the exact same error as shown in the screenshot above, then I found from another article on the web (sorry couldn’t find the link now but very thankful for them) that the Hard disk partition should not be dynamic as Windows 10 can’t upgrade if the system partition is dynamic. Only a Basic partition can be used to upgrade to Windows 10. And they suggested Partition Wizard to convert a dynamic disk to basic. And this was just a single click and hassle free operation with a single restart of the system. No data was harmed and the conversion was over in a matter of minutes. Then when I ran the DVD to upgrade Windows 10 this time it ran without a hitch and I was able to successfully install Windows 10 on my laptop. Even though my laptop, a Dell Vostro 3450 is not supposed to be eligible for Windows 10 update as per the Dell support site and this was the reason given by Microsoft support when I complained that the upgrade process failed multiple times. All the system drivers are working and my external peripheral drives like printer, portable HD are working without a hitch. It’s been almost 20 days now so far it has been a stable and good experience with Windows 10….