Update to 22H2 fails at 87% on 3 incompatible (almost identical) Laptops with no error log.

Laptops - Lenovo B50-80
All have 500gb SSDs with 8GB RAM.
Processors 2 x Intel i5 and 1 intel i3

Upgrade from Win11 21H2 either from mounted ISO or from USB stick gets to 87%, message appears that PC will restart, then the installation stops, and am taken back to the desktop with a basic error message "The installation failed". I cannot find any error log.

This happens on all 3 laptops at the same point.

Any ideas please?

If you have it installed:
Uninstall Malwarebytes
Uninstall ZoneAlarm
Decrypt VeraCrypt System partition.

You can enable those after you're done installing and updating.

Did you use Rufus to create the USB from the ISO. Update/Upgrade on incompatible devices will normally fail (or unless you tweak registry settings et al). One of the reasons why a clean install is recommended.

However, have had success with Rufus USB > don't boot, just run setup.exe from within current installation.

EDIT : When creating the Rufus USB, make sure you tick the right boxes to bypass Windows ersatz security checks.

Bon chance.

TheQuickFox said:

If you have it installed:
Uninstall Malwarebytes
Uninstall ZoneAlarm
Decrypt VeraCrypt System partition.

You can enable those after you're done installing and updating.

Click to expand...

None of those installed.

idgat said:

Did you use Rufus to create the USB from the ISO. Update/Upgrade on incompatible devices will normally fail (or unless you tweak registry settings et al). One of the reasons why a clean install is recommended.

However, have had success with Rufus USB > don't boot, just run setup.exe from within current installation.

EDIT : When creating the Rufus USB, make sure you tick the right boxes to bypass Windows ersatz security checks.

Bon chance.

Click to expand...

USB was made with Rufus, including the security checks.

Just wondering, could it be to do with partitions?

Is NET framework 3.5 disabled? I remember this along with Malwarebytes prevented installation.

lafargeotte said:

USB was made with Rufus, including the security checks.

Click to expand...

"... including bypassing the security checks" ?

Sorry, it was not clear - including by passing security checks.

Following on from my previous post, I have seen that the recovery partition on all 3 laptops is before the Windows partition.
On my desktop, which upgraded successfully, the recovery partition is after the Windows partition.
Should the recovery partition be after the Windows partition?
I would like to try (on one laptop initially) to move the recovery partition or delete and add a new recovery partition after the Windows partition to see if that is what is causing the fail.
Can anyone point me to a reliable tutorial to do this please.

Before the 2019 version of Windows 10 came out the default disk layout was:
Recovery-EFI-MSRP-System (usually C:)
You can see all of this on my 2014 vintage Surface Pro 3, via MiniTool Partition Wizard:

After that version came out, the default disk layout changed to
EFI-MSRP-System (usually C:)-Recovery. Omitting the MSRP (which follows the EFI pretty much always), that layout looks like this in Disk Management on my 2019 or 2020 vintage Lenovo X12 Hybrid Laptop:

HTH,
--Ed--

I do recall that on a number of clean installs the recovery partition has been at the "end" of the other partitions.

However, none of my devices has a recovery partition any more ... I just create image(s) - Macrium Reflect/AOMEI Backupper - and then delete the recovery partition.

So far, nothing has failed.

Even putting the partitions in the right order did not solve the problem.

So I did a clean install on one of the laptops which worked fine. I then imaged the disk of that laptop and put the image on the other laptops. All seems ok now.