Area-51 R4, Windows 11 disaster

Question

Bad start: Ordered replacement hard drive so I could try 11 and easily go back. Disk drive was scam or stolen by post office. Bought another drive locally. Used Acronis to clone. Swapped drives, booted and started the upgrade. Went out to eat during the actual install but got back only in time to see the upgrade was reverting back to windows 10. Looked at Event Viewer and tried to fix the problems by uninstalling the devices the win 11 upgrade reported it had problems with: Uninstalled all XBOX. Do not even have one. XBOX bar was grayed out had to google how to uninstall. Uninstalled Intel rapid technology and intel iastore drivers that were old duplicates. I left the newer iastore drives in. Had to use revo uninstaller as the older iastore were missing the uninstall ap; Summery of what happened top down is Nov 17 bottom is Nov 16 looking at event logs: ---somewhere here i shut it down and it started a disk check ---start of a lot of apphang, appcrash, and failure to setr restore points 7:15am end of over 1000 msi installer info 7:10am msi installer info started again ---about 30 app hang 'explorer' 11/17/2021 6:43 winlogin screen had no icons 11:13 last of maybe 1000 msi installer infos 10:42 more msiinststaller info 10:41 start of scattered NVidia display errors 10 of them 8:52 one of my apps attempted to veto a shutdown 4:47pm restart manager --lot of outlook, security, database info 2:15pm end of maybe 1000 msiiinstaller info 1:54pm stared more msiinstaller info --iastore error --problems with search --startup repair 1:49pm winlogon too too long warning 7:35 restart manager ===all msiinstaller info several 100 6:48 on 11/16 After making changes (uninstalls) the system would not boot and Alienware boot tried to do a lot of fixing, recovering and all the microsoft recovery selections showed up. I put the original hard drive back in and same problem, windows did not boot and the same boot fixing was attempted by Alienware or Microsoft. I have no idea why the original disk did not boot up. I put the new disk back in as I did not want to have the original fooled with by the bios or Microsoft and after an hour or trying I managed to boot the new disk (not the original) after disabling secure boot and enabling legacy. My bios has been set to use AHCI and not that intel rapid technology. The M.2 has 256gb that is used by PrimoCache to speed up all other drives. I had pulled other drives out before trying win11 upgrade. What I am going to do: Remove all startups that are unnecessary, disable primo cache and try again.

Joseph Stateson · Accepted Answer

Got it up and running on second tryWhat I removed from the windows 10 startup. I was not sure exactly what might be causing the problem so I took out anything I thought I could do without All apple stuff: itunes, icloud (all 5 of them), apowermirror All HP (several printer update apps) All Acronis (3) All Adobe (3) DVDFab, Garmin, Gridcoin, Java, Github, Google drive, Cortana What I uninstalled PrimoCache, Intel iaStore HDC and also the SCSI but the ones dated 2017, but not the ones dated 2018. I assume these are needed??? Intel rapid store technology. Not used and AHCI is enabled not RST in my BIOS What I should have uninstalled All NVidia drivers for my RTX2080 as the win11 took then out completely after a lot of error messages=============What I put back in PrimoCache - had to assign a drive letter to the M.2 before Primo saw it and did its thing Nvidia 496.76 driver for RTX 2080 All the Acronis went back in Tested as good the following DVDfab - ripped DVD to MP4 ok Sensors App all worked. Created the same motorboat sound as win10 did PrimoCache - made a noticeable difference compared bare 7200 RPM WD Blacks. Bluray disk played in DvdFab Player but NOT in Windows 11 Media player Have not decided if the icloud HP and Adobe are needed or not.

speedstep · Answer

romexsoftware primo-cache is not supported by Dell or Microsoft.

Standard WIN10 installs work Just fine on your model without issue.

Dell only supports the OS that it shipped with so if you want support buy RETAIL windows.

Joseph Stateson · Answer

@speedstep wrote:

romexsoftware primo-cache is not supported by Dell or Microsoft.

Standard WIN10 installs work Just fine on your model without issue.

Dell only supports the OS that it shipped with so if you want support buy RETAIL windows.

This was attempt to install windows 11.

PrimoCache has worked fine and I have had no problem. I am disabling in event of Windows 11 problem. The errors reported by event viewer show problem with intel iastore, nVidia and "XBOX". I will be doing a clean install if my next inplace upgrade fails.

Vanadiel · Answer

Might be working fine under windows 10, but that does not mean it will work fine under windows 11.

Windows 11 introduces an upgraded OS storage stack for DirectStorage. Currently Microsoft only open its new DirectStorage API to game developers.

I would completely uninstall Primo Cache before attempting to upgrade.

Joseph Stateson · Answer

@Vanadiel wrote:

Might be working fine under windows 10, but that does not mean it will work fine under windows 11.

Windows 11 introduces an upgraded OS storage stack for DirectStorage. Currently Microsoft only open its new DirectStorage API to game developers.

I would completely uninstall Primo Cache before attempting to upgrade.

I have been reading about that technology. It has not been made available to anyone else according primo support forum. My system came with all type of Intel drivers for rapid start, octane etc, but octane was not installed. I do have 256gb NVME that was my "C" drive at one time, but no longer. My understanding of intel RST is it was good for window 7 and only provided a slight improvement with optane.

I am not married to PrimoCache and it can go the way of optane and RST. I assume Microsoft's direct store works with intel chipsets like on my Area51. As long as my M.2 is faster then my hard drives I suspect SSD can provide caching to speed things up.

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