Thread: can NOT get windows 7 to upgrade to 8. at all.

preface, i am fairly competant with this stuff. with win 95, 98, and xp i could boot into DOS and use commands to overwrite files and get problems fixed. but can't do that any longer....

i have an HP p6320y and the only thing after market as of now (i jerked out a lot of stuff) on the MoBo is a BluRay drive. i replaced the DVD drive here while back, but if it works fine in 7, there should be no issue.

i have talked to 3 Microsoft techs, and no luck. this is getting extremely infuriating, its beyond frustrating or inconvenience. its like, full on technological anger management meltdown now. so let me recap what i have done, what the techs have done, and how nothing is fixed.

first of all, what i have done: i have an HP with OEM win 7 x64 home premium on it. i have in the past ran win 8 developer preview. actually i have installed that several times just to show family members at different times what is coming. install program worked perfect, OS worked perfect on my pc. but now that i have paid for it, nothing. at first i installed as upgrade on my OEM and chose to keep nothing. it does the whole install process on the desktop, when the computer restarts to set it up, the screen comes up to the blue window logo screen with spinning dots, shows it processing to 75%, then restarts again and hangs at that same screen for like 2 hrs. then it says it could not install windows 8 and will revert back to win 7. the weird thing is, when it hangs, the hardrive is completely unaccessed. like i place my ear on the hardisk itself, no sounds, no clicks, no searching. the HDD access light on the tower is just ON. no blink, not off, just on. why the heck is there no activity? why does the computer just start and show me a graphic of the window? shouldnt it be accessing and working? after about 45 minutes, it says it's not able to uprade and will revert to how my computer was to begin with and rolls back to win7. great.

after that i tried to install it with the set-up disk as bootable, and to choose customer, and full install on formatted hardisk. does the exact same thing.

after that i decided to use a family member's full retail install, and after it was installed, i re-registered it with my OEM key, so this is a completely clean retail win7 install. no bloat, no nothing. i unplugged ALL devices, retried. it still hangs at the same screen. it never recovers from the second restart!!

so after that i formatted c again, and installed the OEM OS back on it, redownloaded the upgrade exe, and tried again, and still nothing.

now i called tech support friday, saturday, and sunday. 1 guy did a remote access but couldnt find anything. the next guy had me do a dskchk and that did nothing. and the third guy did a remote access and changed some setting that i couldnt see any value in changing to begin with, we did anothe rinstall, this time, still nothing. he said i will have to speack with tier2, but they can only talk to me tomorrow. all 3 guys it hangs at the same spot! why will this idiot box not upgrade!?! THERE IS NO CONFLICTS! ITS A BRAND NEW FACTORY RESET OS!!! i'm seriously going to lose my sanity over this because what should be a 1 hr upgrade has ruined my whole weekend, for no reason i can figure out.

i have disconnected everything from the MoBo that can be disconnected. and still, nothing. i never save backup sor anything with this. i just have all my install discs ripped as ISOs on an external hardrives, and start at the top and re-instal each one, one by one. and i do that with all my personal files to (video, audio, pictures, documents, etc)

i just can't think the driver issue would matter, because what if this was a brand new PC build i did myslef? how would i install the drivers, if i can't boot to a desktop to begin with?

does anyone out there know at all what is the deal? why am i not able to install this upgrade? please, someone. anyone. help.

no matter what, i can not get it to update. why is this so hard to do? why will this upgrade just not work? i have redownloaded the file liek 4 times, and wasted 3 days now. trying. my eyes are killing me, my head is killing me. for 3 days straight i been crawling around unhooking cables, removing peripherales. the side panel and front panel of my pc are removed, all the hardrives are removed, all the pci devices are removed, i have wiped and formatted C:/ drive so many times it should be perfectly defragged now. there is just no hope or answer in sight i feel. i will try again with absolutely everything unplugged from the MoBo, but if my grandpa had this computer, how the heck would he get the upgrade done? he doesnt even know how to eject the cd. and if i have to re-install.... i don't want to have to do all this garbage all over again. i just want some kind of solution.

i have ran windows 8 dev preview 3 different times... what makes this time so different?

Originally Posted by kemical

Hi Keith,

just to run through the basics, I looked at your system and is it fully updated regarding bios and Harddrive updates? Also when you burned the install disk was it at the speed of 4x? Any faster and problems appear..

HP does have it's own advice for your system here:
Upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 8 HP Pavilion p6320y Desktop PC | HP® Support

thanks for the article. looking through there, there is no bios update that i could find for it yet:-/ would the MoBo manufacturer possibly have one their own? didn't think about that... i burned the disc at... 4 or 8. cant remember. i haven't even used the disc anymore. i just gave it the finger after the Nth try and been trying the desktop upgrade .exe utility instead. i just find it hard to believe that my pc would not be supported, when there is supposed to be droves of XP users upgrading. their crap is 11 years old! lol i got mine just 2 years ago. i only want to buy up when i can find one with a dual quad-core and 16gb of ram for about the same price... which may take a couple more years. i can wait.