Insider Preview 19002 Poses Peculiar Problems
Man! I’ve had quite the afternoon today. Earlier, Microsoft dropped the latest Fast Ring build for 20H1. Numbered 19002.1, it’s raising hackles among many of its recipients. In fact, for the first time in I can’t remember when, the new build worked on neither of my two Fast Ring test machines. It took me over two hours to finally stumble across a solution for my Lenovo X380 Yoga unit. I haven’t yet upgraded my older Lenovo X220 Tablet PC. The primary symptom of trouble is widely reported (see this TenForums thread, for example). The setup phase while the old OS is in control proceeds until the first reboot occurs. But then, the PC goes into Restart (with spinning balls) and hangs there forever. Microsoft acknowledges this is indeed a problem and recommends some potential workarounds (see this Answers.Microsoft.com post dated 10/17). But none of that stuff worked for me. That’s why I believe Insider Preview 19002 poses peculiar problems for installers. Let me explain. . .
Getting to the latest version of the Insider Preview poses multiple, unusual challenges.
Why Say Insider Preview 19002 Poses Peculiar Problems?
Without getting past the initial reboot, Win10 installation can’t succeed. I tried everything I could think of on the X380 Yoga. But it wasn’t until I disconnected all USB devices, and popped out the SDXC card, that restart completed. I’d remembered a similar problem on earlier Insider Previews with my Surface Pro 3. Then, too, removing those devices allowed the machine to reboot successfully. Worked on the X380 Yoga, too. After that, the actual upgrade was pretty quick. Less than 15 minutes later, the desktop was available. That’s where I captured the preceding screenshot.
When the install completed, I’d lost my fingerprint reader. Having experienced this before, I went into Device Manager and reinstalled the on-disk device driver. That pretty much takes care of the X380 Yoga, which I must now clean up and back up to complete my usual post-upgrade drill.
The X220 Tablet Proves More Resistant
Unplugging the USB devices didn’t result in a successful restart on this machine. I could reboot successfully using the MS Answers workaround, though. For the record it’s shutdown /r /t 0 /f in an administrative PowerShell or cmd.exe session. I visited UUPdump.ml and grabbed the files necessary to build an ISO for 19002.1, then did just that on my project PC. I copied the ISO to a local drive on the X220 T, mounted it as a volume, and am running setup.exe from that volume right now. It’s 76 percent through the GUI install phase, so I still don’t know if this retry from code that didn’t come from Windows Update will actually surmount the reboot hurdle. I’ll keep blogging though, until I see what happens.
As I took a break for dinner with “the Boss,” this latest install did get through the first reboot and is now 77 percent through the post-GUI “Working on updates” phase. That means it’s already rebooted at least 2 and possibly 3 times, so apparently this approach has worked. I’m not sure if it was removing the USB external drive and the SD card that did the trick, or switching to the UUPdump-based installer. Whatever it is (or was), I’m just glad it got me over the hump. And so it sometimes goes, here in Windows-World!
Concluding Note: Success!
The X220 Tablet just showed me a lock screen, and is now working through the “Getting a few things ready” prior to initial boot. In fact, I’m now on the desktop and 19002.1 is in charge. What a relief! As is so often the case with Win10, where there’s enough will, there’s a way to get it installed.