Windows 10 upgrade only worked once (kind of)

[xayd]

I have OSX and Windows 7 running via the most recent clover on different partitions of the same HD, on an intel nuc 5i7RYH. It’s been working fine for many years, booting both OS via EFI.

I heard that the free upgrade to Windows 10 might still work due to Windows 7’s EOL, so I ran the online update within Windows 7 to check it out. It seemed to work until the reboot, but clover booting the installer didn’t work after the initial stage. Rebooting to the prior EFI for Windows 7 restored Windows 7 to its prior state.

I saw a post from RehabMan on this forum about the need to boot without clover during the Windows 10 setup so figured I would try again, but after failing once it seems that Windows has some sort of mechanism to lock me out of the upgrade. No matter what I do the upgrade now fails after the initial download, even if I delete the ~WS, ~BT, and ESD folders entirely before starting it. Unfortunately I don’t have a pre-failure restore point to go back to.

I found another post suggesting manually running the executable for the second stage of the Windows 10 installer after the failure, but doing so causes the installer to wipe the contents of the source folder it was run from, and then fail again. It seems as if Microsoft noted that people figured out a way to use their broken, worthless trash against all odds, and set out to ensure that they stopped anyone from doing so.

anyone ever run into this and fix it?

 

[xayd]

Progress:

with a minimal Windows 7 install I’m able to get about 30% into phase 2 of the update but the problem/failure seems to be the intel i218-v NIC on the nuc not having an integral Windows 10 driver.

 

[xayd]

Solution:

After two days of puttering around with the most recent v2004 Windows 10 installer, it's just broken.

I found a link generator that got me the previous v1909 Windows 10 ISO, which installed without a hitch on the first try.