cannot upgrade VM to Windows 10

[Ned]

Doing the upgrade from Win7 SP1 via Win10 ISO.  Part way through the installation it fails, reboots into windows 7 and displays the following error:

 

"The installation failed in the SAFE_OS phase with an error during BOOT operation"

 

I've been doing a lot of googling and I've discovered that Microsoft released an Intel CPU microcode update (KB3064209) that is causing Windows 10 installations to fail.  I've done this upgrade many times before but I recently upgraded to a new board/CPU and am now getting this issue.  I've done the usual selection of only 1-core, CPU emulation, tried different versions of VirtIO drivers (stable and latest, even tried to upgrade Win7 to Win10 VirtIO drivers before attempting the Win10 upgrade itself).

 

Nothing works, I get this error every time!

 

Is there a workaround for this?

[Naldinho]

I'm too new to VMs to be of any assistance on a proper solution but since the issue is only with the installing Windows 10 my approach would be to attempt to circumvent that.

 

1) Copy one of your previous vdisks with Windows 10 installed and use that for new VMs until this issues is resolved.

 

2) Install Windows 10 on a physical machine then do the convert physical machine to VM procedure.

 

3) Rather than use the upgrade tool from Microsoft download the actual ISO and install it using your Windows 7 key to register it. Maybe doing a full install with the media present rather than the upgrade will work. If it doesn't find someone who downloaded the ISO before the KB3064209 update.

[bungee91]

Are you using the downloadable iso for upgrade, or the upgrade wizard (GWX) for update?

 

If not the downloadable ISO, you'll want to switch to that.

For the 1-core selection, I believe core 0 is preffered.

How much ram is assigned to the VM? I would reduce this if you're passing an unnecessary amount during this upgrade (minimizing potential issues), 4-8GB is more than sufficient for this operation.

[meep]

I'm not sure if it's still an issue but a while back I had problems like this.

 

The issue was that I had more that 1 CPU assigned to a VM,

 

The solution was to reduce the CPU pin count to exactly 1 for the duration of the upgrade process.

 

Once upgrade is complete, you can change it back again.

 

 

 

[Ned]

Appreciate the responses... I did mention in my post that I'm using the Win10 ISO and I have set it to use only one core (core 0) etc. before attempting the upgrade.  I've done this many times without issue, I'm only getting this now that I've switched to this new Intel CPU.  Also for RAM, I've tried it with 2, 3, 4GB, no difference.

 

Regarding Naldinho's post, I was thinking about copying one of my other win10 vdisks and setting it up as another VM (change the computer name, NIC mac address, etc.) but wouldn't that cause a windows licensing issue since both VMs would be using the same license key?

 

Lastly regarding getting a copy of the win10 ISO pre-KB3064209, any idea where I could download a copy of that?  Don't think Microsoft allows downloading back-dated versions...

 

Thanks

[Naldinho]

It would cause a licencing issue but you can change the licence after you get it working. I have never done it but there is an option to change your licence / product key from within Windows.

 

For an old version of Windows ISO I don't know of any official source. The hope would be that someone here would have one.

 

[Ned]

So it sounds like there is no official solution to this issue?

[Ned]

Well, looks like I found the magic combo of settings to get past this issue on my i7-6800k.  Host CPU passthrough, core 0, 2GB initial/max memory, i440fx-2.3, SeaBIOS.

 

Hope that helps anyone else who gets stuck with this issue.

[essjay]

Does anyone know if the new Windows 10 license key is matched to this particular VM and it's resources (CPUs etc).

 

I need to build a physical Windows 10 machine and decommission a VM. I have Windows 7 on the VM. Can I upgrade that VM to 10, then create a bootable USB drive to use on the new physical machine and decommission the VM?

 

The actual hardware will be the same as I'm moving the unRAID array to lower spec kit and using the original unRAID machine for a Win10 workstation.

 

 

[saarg]

Does anyone know if the new Windows 10 license key is matched to this particular VM and it's resources (CPUs etc).

 

I need to build a physical Windows 10 machine and decommission a VM. I have Windows 7 on the VM. Can I upgrade that VM to 10, then create a bootable USB drive to use on the new physical machine and decommission the VM?

 

The actual hardware will be the same as I'm moving the unRAID array to lower spec kit and using the original unRAID machine for a Win10 workstation.

 

The license is tied to the uuid of the VM, so I doubt you can move it without contacting Microsoft.

[BobPhoenix]

Does anyone know if the new Windows 10 license key is matched to this particular VM and it's resources (CPUs etc).

 

I need to build a physical Windows 10 machine and decommission a VM. I have Windows 7 on the VM. Can I upgrade that VM to 10, then create a bootable USB drive to use on the new physical machine and decommission the VM?

 

The actual hardware will be the same as I'm moving the unRAID array to lower spec kit and using the original unRAID machine for a Win10 workstation.

 

The license is tied to the uuid of the VM, so I doubt you can move it without contacting Microsoft.

And according to what I read Microsoft will tell you to buy a new OS.  So if this works for you I would be interested to know what you did or what you told them to allow it.