Windows 10 upgrade is stuck at 31%

I am trying to upgrade from Windows 7 Pro to Windows 10 (yes, I know it is pretty late to do it, but I had my reasons - most of them are related to laziness). So I have found many sites claiming that the upgrade is still officially available from Microsoft, although they do not publish it too much. I have downloaded the Windows 10 installation tool from here https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10 , hit the "Upgrade this PC now" button and waited. At some point, the setup finally started to work with nice percentage, but it was stuck at 31% for more than 2 hours.

What I have already tried to do - with no luck, still hangs at 31%:

• Restart of setup
• Restart of the PC
• Disconnected external USB drive
• Disconnected the second monitor
• Disconnected all USB devices (keyboard, mouse)

The question is - where should I look to solve this problem? Maybe the upgrade process has some kind of trace/log file?

Solution 1:

Finally got it resolved. The log file is here c:\$Windows.~BT\Sources\Panther\setupact.log

The last line in this log was about Conexant Audio driver.

Info                  MIG    AddDriverFiles: Processing device: 4d36e96c-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318
Info                  MIG    AddDriverFiles: Processing driver: Conexant SmartAudio HD, Conexant, Conexant
Info                  MIG    AddInfAndCatalog: Adding catalog file: C:\Windows\system32\catroot\{f750e6c3-38ee-11d1-85e5-00c04fc295ee}\oem55.cat

I have fully uninstalled it, rerun the upgrade and it finished without any problems.

More to read: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/upgrade/log-files

Solution 2:

So - this is kind of interesting. Today, I decided to upgrade to Windows 11 (even though my laptop from 2016 has a CPU that falls just outside the approved window - haha). And I got stuck at exactly 31% in the update process, which prompted me to google the issue which quickly led me here. And even if the thread here was for a Windows 10 upgrade (from Windows 7), I figured it couldn't hurt to try the proposed solution.

I cancelled the upgrade, uninstalled both Conexant drivers (for speakers and micropone), and restarted the upgrade process. And YES - it worked perfectly. No more being stuck - it chewed right through the upgrade, and now I'm on Windows 11!