On 23/11/2019 10:15, T i m wrote:
On Fri, 22 Nov 2019 16:51:26 +0000, John Rumm
wrote:

snip

..... download the Win 10 media creation tool and let it
"update" the current machine - it will give you an upgrade install of
win 10 without losing programs and data.

I thought the original in-situ upgrade option expired some time ago
and the media creation tool only produced bootable installation media
(DVD/USB) to allow you to *install* W10 but still using a W7-8
licence?

They stopped pushing out automatic upgrades, and announced the end of
the free program. However no one seem to have told their media creation
tool :-)

I believe you can use the tool for a clean install using a win 7 / 8.1
key - although I have not tried. You however can still perform an in
situ upgrade. It keeps all apps and data intact, and saves the old
windows folder in a windows.old folder (which you can use the disk
cleanup tool to remove should you want the space back)

You may not be able to do a 32bit to 64bit upgrade though.

Can I conform we are still able to *upgrade* a W7-8 installation to
W10 with all user data and (more importantly) programs and settings
intact (and if so possibly also 'how' please if it's not obvious).

Yes certainly. I did it on my laptop last week and it was fine[1].

Go he

https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/soft...load/windows10

Run tool, wait (lots of downloading), select "upgrade this PC" option
and follow though the prompts.

[1] It was more hassle on this machine than I have had previously since
there was not sufficient space on the system reserved partition to do
it. In the end I had to give it a bit of a poke[2] with the command line
to make a new larger reserved partition in some previously unallocated
space.

[2] The upgrade process needs a few hundred meg on the system reserved
partition to work. Most of the time there will be plenty of space.
However now and then (usually on machines that were originally HDD and
were cloned to a smaller SSD) the system reserved partition may have
been shrunk "to fit" and not have the space. The easy fix for this is to
create a new partition, and transfer required boot paraphernalia to it,
then promote it to being the active partition.

Just in case anyone needs to do the same:

Go into disk management (right click on Computer / This PC, select
Manage, then click Disk Management at the bottom of the tree view on the
left).

Create a new simple partition of at least 400 MB, and give it a drive
letter - say G:

Open a command prompt with admin privilege (search for CMD, the right
click and choose "run as administrator")

To copy required info to the new reserved partition type:

bcdboot c:\windows /s g:

Now enter the disk partition tool:

diskpart

In the tool, select your new volume:

select volume g

Make it active:

active

Exit the tool:

exit


Go back to disk management, and remove the drive letter from the
reserved partition.


--
Cheers,

John.

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