My not so great experience with the new setup experience on 24H2 (preview)

I'm a little bit displeased with my experience installing 24H2 so far.

First, I need to set the stage and explain a couple of things...

My plan today was to perform a clean install of 24H2 preview on my laptop. The laptop is a Lenovo that came from the factory with Win 11 Pro. It has everything needed to be considered supported by Windows 11 and it even shipped with Win 11 as I already noted. Another thing to know is that I typically do my installations using unattended setup. I have quite a few unattended setup files that I have created that all work flawlessly for installing Win 11 23H2.

1) So, the first thing that I struggled with today was trying to install unattended. I found that any answer file that performs a 100% completely unattended installation of Windows 11 works fine. However, any answer file that is "lite" and purposely leaves off some unattended steps so that the user can address them manually during installation don't work for some reason. They always result in this error right near the start of setup:

Windows installation encountered an unexpected error. Error code: 0x80070490 - 0x4002c

2) Next, I thought that I would try a manual installation. But, every time I get to the point in the installation where setup should start copying files, it fails like this:



One of the setup screens has an option that says "Previous Version of Setup". Selecting that was the only way that I could accomplish setup.

3) Next, I normally place an ei.cfg file in my Windows installation media. By doing this, Windows setup asks which edition of Windows I want to install (Home, Pro, etc.). However, with 24H2, it never asks me what version I want to install whether or not I have an ei.cfg in place. The workaround is the same: Use the previous version of setup.

4) Activation - I have NEVER had a machine that I could not activate. There were one or two where I had to select the option to troubleshoot to get it to activate, but on my laptop, for the life of me I could not get it to work. Thankfully, part of the troubleshooting was for Windows to ask me for my phone number so that a tech could call me. They called me almost instantly and had me activated inside of about five minutes, so I will at least give them an "A" for both rapid response and resolution. The very first command that they gave to me was one I had not seen before that showed my original product key from Lenovo. Here is that command:

wmic path softwarelicensingservice get OA3xOriginalProductKey

I guess that after I get some shuteye, it will be time to do some research and see if I can get any answers. I've already done some research and struck out, but we'll have to go deep on this one.

Of all the things to change, I'm curious why Microsoft felt the need to go so heavy handed on setup. As far as I could tell, setup was working very well before.

hsehestedt said:

Thankfully, part of the troubleshooting was for Windows to ask me for my phone number so that a tech could call me. They called me almost instantly and had me activated inside of about five minutes, so I will at least give them an "A" for both rapid response and resolution

Click to expand...

Not what I would of thought would happen. Sorry that you had so much grief.

Quick (unrelated) question - did your clean install of 24H2 Pro do all the drive encryption/bitlocker stuff that's been mentioned on this forum and other places?