Windows 7 to Windows 8 Upgrade Failures and Success

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Patrick

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Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
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Thought I would start a thread. I have been trying in-place upgrades and so far have one work perfectly. My main desktop however, did not work. The installation screen finishes then the system reboots. A black screen with a blue windows logo and a white progress circle displays but never finishes.

Net impact is that I will be doing a clean installation.

I did want to see what others are seeing and maybe tips to get around those issues.
 

mobilenvidia

Moderator
Sep 25, 2011
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New Zealand
Check LSI drivers, make sure you are not running anything newer than the default Win8 install ones for now.
Latest drivers are gave me similar issue as you, would boot but only as far as you got.

Newer drivers are extremely unstable, also affected Windows 7, had to go back to January driver, as the system would just become unresponsive.
Not sure if its also related to latest Firmware.
Both drivers and Firmware are now pulled from LSI site.
I'm running IBM Firmware (critical update) with Latest BIOS from LSI firmware.

All strange but I would start with with checking drivers in Win8, uninstall back to original version. (5.x.xxx)
 

Patrick

Administrator
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Dec 21, 2010
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No LSI cards in that box. Maybe uninstall additional drivers and give it one more shot.
 

Patrick

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Dec 21, 2010
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Clean installation worked. Had some hangups then found a UEFI setting on the ASUS P9X79 WS to update the Marvell firmware. I let that firmware update, cold booted, and the installation blazed ahead. I changed from a two drive RAID 0 array to a single 256GB Crucial M4 so I left the Windows 7 installation on the RAID disks and changed the Intel controller to ACHI mode. Windows 8 is working great.

One big tip here is: Put everything on network storage. I basically use Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Cloud for 90% of the stuff I do. Since I have kept all files on network storage for years, nothing except driver updates and the like locally.

Oh... and within an hour I had Windows 8 running with Hyper-V and Ubuntu 12.10 running off iSCSI.
 

Aluminum

Active Member
Sep 7, 2012
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Not really an upgrade, but I have been running Win8 from a fresh install on the asus C216 board for over a month now, no problems. (technet RTM ISO, same thing for sale today)

Installed classic shell the first hour, can't stand the new UI but I pretty much get to ignore it once I log in.

Its not the only OS image on that machine, but it is my gaming box so it gets plenty of use. (7970 sits there doing nothing with the other images, but it idles at like 3W with no load so who cares)
 

Patrick

Administrator
Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
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Not really an upgrade, but I have been running Win8 from a fresh install on the asus C216 board for over a month now, no problems. (technet RTM ISO, same thing for sale today)

Installed classic shell the first hour, can't stand the new UI but I pretty much get to ignore it once I log in.

Its not the only OS image on that machine, but it is my gaming box so it gets plenty of use. (7970 sits there doing nothing with the other images, but it idles at like 3W with no load so who cares)
Been using the RTM for awhile now... but decided to hold off until launch to upgrade the rig. Really happy with how well and how fast it has come together.
 

renderfarmer

Member
Feb 22, 2013
249
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New Jersey
My Sabertooth X79 system ran beautifully with both the Win8 upgarde and a win8 clean install. It was a real dream. No problems at all.

Then I got my Dell T7600 workstation and that was a nightmare. I got 4 BSODs a day on average. At first it was storA.sys and srtorS.sys. I got updates for those and that went away. Then I got very random driver related crashes like cdrom.sys even though i hadn't used the DVD drive since I installed Win8 through it. Other crashes I couldn't diagnose. after talking to Dell tech support I decided to re-install the OEM Win7 because I actually nee this machine for work and at the moment Win8 wasn't stable enough. They suggested I wait untill Win8 SP1 later in the year befor eI tray again.
 

awedio

Active Member
Feb 24, 2012
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My Sabertooth X79 system ran beautifully with both the Win8 upgarde and a win8 clean install. It was a real dream. No problems at all.

Then I got my Dell T7600 workstation and that was a nightmare. I got 4 BSODs a day on average. At first it was storA.sys and srtorS.sys. I got updates for those and that went away. Then I got very random driver related crashes like cdrom.sys even though i hadn't used the DVD drive since I installed Win8 through it. Other crashes I couldn't diagnose. after talking to Dell tech support I decided to re-install the OEM Win7 because I actually nee this machine for work and at the moment Win8 wasn't stable enough. They suggested I wait untill Win8 SP1 later in the year befor eI tray again.
Wow, that's a surprise for the T7600

My HP Z800 has run Win 8, since the Cons Preview with SSDs, like a champ
:eek: The LSI controller in my HP is 1068 based
 

Lost-Benji

Member
Jan 21, 2013
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The arse end of the planet
Windows 8 is a mixed bag of fruit, plain and simple. I have already done a bucket-load of installs and a few upgrades. The upgrades found themselves nuked due to low performance.

The big suck of Winblows is that the OS was rushed, it has not had time to mature before release leading to why admins the world over stay away from an OS until it is service-packed.
I use Win8 across the bulk of my servers and PC's at home. Metro is the second thing nuked, all the bloat (apps) are uninstalled first.

I have come to the general impression driver support from MS is in the gutter. Out of the box, Win7 was bloody great at working with just about any hardware, sadly, win8 needs coaxing a lot on even new hardware. UEFI boards I have found to give more headaches and certainly no performance gain that UEFI was supposed to yield.

The only hardware platforms I have seen positive performance boost was the AMD FX81XX, Intel platforms run just as fast on 7 as they do with 8.

One of these days, M$ will fix their mess with lsass.exe leaking memory, I have had it with bloody M$-based forums with admins living in denial. There are claims that client PC's running win8 cause the host system to leak and is looking at killing QoS out of the clients stack, I can tell you, it is bullshit. The only way I have temporally fixed it is to rip out drivers M$ insist are the latest and greatest for the RealTek NIC and use generic Realtek set. Mind you, the hardware ID doesn't match, the NIC is a 8111B but drivers show it as 8168 from memory. The catch here though was it wasn't just drivers, I have had to kill off the PageFile as this left on seen the blow-out return at random times. Running the system for a long soak to see what happens. The other win8 servers don't have this issue, they just suck at networking and shares.

If someone finds a way to stop win8 trying to act as though it is on a domain, please let me know. Sick and tired of having to use credentials to access shares on win8 hosted folders from win8 machines. Win7 machines rip straight in without the headaches. While on shares, what wanker at M$ decided we need so many hidden admin shares? I am tired of either manually killing them or having to permanently remove them. This comes from hardware media-players that flat-out refuse to see anything on the network while a win8 system is broadcasting these admin shares.

Server 2012 is a plain mongrel to share files with, have blown a few installs away in the past. They just refuse to do plain sharing.

Storage Spaces is the only use I have for win8 on my servers (I don't run server due to above comment), seriously looking at FlexRAID on a win7 system soon. Even with my tweaks to the Parity and seeing 60-70MB/sec writes, the writes are still to slow for my wants/needs and combined with sharing mess, it's days are numbered.

WMC is nothing special either, I managed to get it working on a couple of systems (what twat thought to sell it as an extra????) but it is the same as WMC7. Still a pain in arse to get CODECs working to output the correct streams.


Boot times, oh yeah, lets rave about fast boots: um, NOPE. Yes it is fast but this is thanks to it just paging the kernel/core to the HDD's now slowing down shutdown. If you have moved to the modern age and running SSD's, they boot win7 just as fast. If your boots are slow on anything, clean out your bloat/junk. If you are on anything doing a serving role, look for the hacks/mods to kill off the fast booting bullshit, leaving it on just keeps any of the bugs for the next time the system starts meaning you have to REBOOT to clear it fresh. Proved this with the leaking lsass.exe that just keeping staying full after manually shutting down before server crashed.

Win8 works well for the home PC or Tablet. I would not suggest it for business or main systems unless you have the time to fix it all the time.