14 November 2015

Fix - Dell Venue 8 Pro Windows 10 Fall update gets stuck at 40%

My Dell Venue 8 Pro that I primarily use as an e-reader was the last of the flock to get the update... so after gone trough the plight of getting about 8GB of data free to be able to actually start the Fall update... it got stuck at 40%. Twice, actually. It was installing a whole night but never passed 40%.

The root cause appeared to be an SD card. The fix is pretty easy.

  1. Hold the power button till your DV8P powers down
  2. Once it has shut down, pop out the SD card
  3. Power it up again.
  4. It will now restore your previous version of Windows, that is, the Windows 10 RTM 10240. Wait for that complete (should be a few minutes)
  5. Follow this procedure as described by Rod Trent on the SuperSite for Windows
  6. The update will now complete (fingers crossed)
  7. Once it's done, login and pop in your SD card again.

At the original writing of this article I was thinking "I have read this somewhere before, but where"? Neither Google or Bing yielded any results. The odd thing is my Surface Pro 1 upgraded flawlessly, although it does have SD card too.

Maybe I did not search thoroughly enough, because a day later the writer of this blog (in Dutch) pointed out he posted the same thing before I did. The post recounts a twitter conversation between Gabe Aul and Mary Jo Foley about popping the SD card on upgrade. I probably have seen the  conversation in my timeline and subconsciously registered it. I admit prior art ;) but I will leave this post up because I think it makes the solution easier to find.

1 comment:

Johnny said...

Thank you so much for this! I spent the morning staring at that damn circle waiting for it to finally move.... then reverted, cleared more space, ran sfc /scannow downloaded the iso, installed it on my SD, and ran again, just to stare at that damn circle again. Found this shortly after! Thanks again!