Hey everyone, I hope you're having a better Monday than I am! I've been struggling for weeks with issues during an in-place upgrade to Windows 11. I recently started a new job as a sysadmin, and part of my role involves managing clients who haven't been updated in ages. Unfortunately, our patching appliance is unable to address these outdated systems.
I've faced numerous DISM errors while attempting to upgrade the base image, and since I haven't had enough time to completely rebuild the image, I decided to push an ISO for a quiet in-place upgrade. The problem is, it only works for about 10% of the clients in production. The upgrade processes fine on newly set-up test machines using the same older image.
When I compare the log files (setuperr and setupact) from both successful and unsuccessful upgrades, they look very similar, but the successful one has over 10,000 more lines of information. Furthermore, there's an issue with our virus protection appliance throwing vulnerability errors every patch day, along with SQL exceptions claiming that we need to reinstall certain software—though my colleagues have told me that's never been done. It feels like I can't trust whether the image is functioning properly, and I'm at a loss on how to pinpoint the correct errors.
Has anyone else run into similar problems? Thanks in advance for your help!
2 Answers
From what you've described, it sounds like your upgrade issues may stem from permissions or existing software conflicts. Since all local admins have been deleted, I'd suggest recreating a local admin and giving that account the necessary permissions. There have been rumors floating around that the original Administrator account behaves differently, so it might be worth testing. Hope that helps!
I totally get your frustration! It sounds like you're dealing with a massive headache here. Have you tried signing in with a local Administrator account to perform the installations manually? Sometimes permissions can be a real blocker during these upgrades. If you can get access and try that out, it might work better. Let me know how it goes!
I usually run tasks as System, but I’ll definitely want to test that with an actual local Admin account. Thanks for the suggestion; I’ll keep you posted!
Yeah, I've heard similar things too. I could make a new local admin for testing, but I might need to check with IT first. Thanks for your input!