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Good morning all,

To cut a long story short, I wanted to upgrade our domain joined Windows 7 PC's to Windows 10 without wiping them all as the I thought it might be faster than creating SCCM task sequences for each department (I was very wrong there...)

I'm 99% sure that an app or program is causing the failure as upgrading a clean built windows 7 machine (with basic config) works fine and selecting the option to 'keep files' (but not apps) is also successful.

Microsoft pointed me to the setup log files located:

C:\$Windows.~BT\Sources\panther\setupact.log

but this log file is ~170MB and has almost 1 million lines. I know this is very vague, but would anyone know how to narrow down what is causing the roll back to Windows 7. Are there particular phrases in the above log file that I can be looking for? Or am I looking in the wrong place completely?

Thanks in advance

sad_admin
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    `Are there particular phrases in the above log file that I can be looking for?` - If it were me I'd look for the words fail and error. – joeqwerty Jan 29 '20 at 11:47
  • unfortunately, "error" comes up 11,280 times and "fail" appears 7515 times – sad_admin Jan 29 '20 at 16:30

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Start at the bottom and search upwards for a line that looks contains

Reporting error event -> [<ErrorCode>, <Extended ErrorCode>]

If it is some sort of incompatibility the first error would probably be 0xC1900208 the extended error could for example be 0x4000C which means "incompatible application detected". In any case you can then start googling using both error codes. (A guide for "IT Pros" by Microsoft can be found here that can also be a good start but in many cases googling will lead to threads that have more suggestions as to what steps to take)

If it is some sort of application incompatibility there will also be serveral files called

CompatData_<Date>_<ID>.xml

in the Panther folder. You can open the newest and it might include some line that states the application responsible for your problem. However I have to warn you that I have seen many cases where those files exists and no useful information is contained within, so you might still be out of luck even if they are created.

Keeping the manual answer for the technicalities but wanted to add there is now also a MS Tool that parses those logs for you and tries to filter the important parts. It is cvalled SetupDiag and can be found here.

Syberdoor
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  • Thanks for the comment. Unfortunately, there was nothing in the log with those error codes – sad_admin Jan 30 '20 at 17:25
  • Those codes were merely an example of codes I myself have seen, but the line "reporting error event" with two codes should be present. I added a link to MS documentation about different codes (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/upgrade/upgrade-error-codes) but you really should not start by looking for a specifc code but rather what code is present in the log. – Syberdoor Jan 31 '20 at 08:53