Question Laptop refuses to completely boot from USB or install Major Win 10 or 11 Upgrade

[slippyjim]

So its a HP 14-bw021AU laptop that was given to my sister, it is an old laptop that has hardly been used, the previous owner did a factory reset and it has installed Win 10 1709.
When she took it home it would not see my sister's wifi. She has a Netcomm router with WPA2-PSK, the 2.4 and 5GHz band are split into separate networks and this laptop can not even see either of them yet it can connect to my phone hotspot even when its set to WPA3 5GHz only

I brought it home and tried to clean install Win 11, tried my Ventoy USB stick, it boots to the menu ok then when I select Win 11 23H2 it shows the "press any key to boot from CD or DVD" like it always does, normally it boots without having to press anything, but no matter what I did it would not boot.
Tried a differet USB with only Win11 23H2 created by Rufus and it shows this text (never seen it before) then it just loads into Windows as before

Tried to upgrade to Win 10 22H2 from within Windows and it gives the error
0xC1900101 - 0x20017
The installation failed on the SAFE_OS phase with an error during BOOT operation


Any ideas on what to do with this thing? I don't want it to beat me now!!

 

[Lutfij]

Would be a good idea to see if your laptop is pending any BIOS updates. If there is a BIOS update pending, update to that, reboot and then retry updating the OS.

tried my Ventoy USB stick
+
Win11 23H2 created by Rufus
Have you tried working with an USB installer fabricated using Windows Media Creation Tools?

 

[slippyjim]

There are no pending BIOS updates.
It has now been installing Win 10 22H2 via Windows updates for around 6 hours and its only at 92% and hasnt even done the first restart yet.....

It's so annoying but that is making me more determined to sort it 😡😡

 

[slippyjim]

I got Windows 11 installed ok from USB by removing the SSD and deleting all partitions on another PC, now have to see if the wifi works ok back at her place tomorrow

Well I say it installed ok, I've just noticed the CPU is stuck at 50% usage @ 0.8GHz ...... AARRRRRRRRGGGGHHHH!!!!!!

Some drivers seemed to have fixed the CPU is stuck at 50% usage @ 0.8GHz now so thats good

 

[slippyjim]

The wifi worked fine at her house on Win 11 so was a bit weird but all good now