"Couldn't update to Windows 8.1 - 0xC1900101 - 0x40017"

Gee!  Took me a while to read all these posts.

OK, so we know that incompatible hardware causes problems. Many of you have removed, replaced hardware or gotten new drivers. You solved the hardware compatibility problem.

The last few pages of posts indicate there is another problem, SOFTWARE INCOMPATIBILITY !

Yes, I believe you have used some software that screwed up your drive C:

Let me say that I have done over 40 installs starting with the first beta. I've updated from 8.0 to 8.1 more than a dozen times, often remotely using TeamViewer. I've update one of my test machines here 7 or 8 times successfully, and 5 times INTENTIONALLY unsuccessfully.

It is time to look at your hard drive.

If you used Acronis, EaseUS or any other imaging, partitioning, formatting, software, you may have inadvertently set yourself up for trouble.

If you clone drives, do registry hacks to move data files, or used a third party tool to migrate to a SSD. You set yourself up for trouble.

If you found that the MS disk manager will not let you do something like convert a dynamic volume back to a Basic volume, but that some other program did, you set yourself up for trouble.

If you installed a 3TB HDD and MS would not partition more than 2.2TB so you used a third party partition manager to use all the space. You set yourself up for trouble.

If you think updating to 8.1 is trouble, If you screwed up your disk storage system, just wait till you plug in a USB stick with a portable version of windows 8 from Server 2013 R2!

Let's look at just one example:

You wanted to move your data from physical disk 0 to disk 1. They both became dynamic volumes. Virtual drive C: is changed from a Basic drive to a Dynamic drive. Virtual disk C: can span discontinuous sections of physical disk 0 or even span physical hard drives. MS disk manager can convert the drive back to basic, but only if NONE of the Dynamic features are in use. MS may tell you that you have to back up data, remove all other partitions, etc. You try EasyUS because it has worked on other machines, but this time, the option to convert back to basic does not even show up. You grab another partitioning program and it converts the drive back to basic in a couple seconds. It just set a few bytes in one hidden sector, but it did not fix the hard links or consolidate the discontinuous sectors back onto the end of the C: partition. What do you suppose happens when you do an upgrade and need to write to those sectors? Bad news? You are in trouble.

If you bought a new tablet or a prebuilt PC and are having problems with the upgrade, call the vendor. If you built your PC and bought a mishmash of uncertified  hardware, you need to contact the vendors of those cheap pieces of junk with their third party software drivers, ... OR ...  You need to do some serious reading on the MS site.

None of the steps worked

My hard drives are RAID 0 I believe that is the problem

Posted is my system configuration

I had the same "progress" - at first  I had the 0x20017 error , but by updating my BIOS and all drivers  and reactivating windows  am getting the 0x40017 error now.

Motherboard: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. 

Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3820 CPU @ 3.60GHz, 3601 Mhz, jádra: 4, logické procesory: 8 

BIOS Version/Date  American Megatrends Inc. F4, 2013-09-05 

BIOS UEFI

In case anyone from Microsoft is monitoring this thread (sorry, but that seems unlikely) and it might help, here is the configuration of my PC:

 

Probably more likely if our comments were written in Hindi or Tamil or Urdu...

   I have 8.1 now running on my machine, unsatisfactorily.  I have an SSD from which I wish the Operating System and my Programs to reside and open, bootup etc...  the SSD has ceased to function following the remote computer management of Micros...s and the 8.1 OS boots reluctantly from a backup HDD...  I will start a new SSD problem thread/page for the 8.1 update, obviously there are a GREAT number of different issues resulting from this fiasco somewhat hardware/software dependent ...

Here's to our computers running something smoothly without problems...

I'm yet another Windows 8.0 user totally frustrated having wasted nearly two weeks of my time trying to upgrade to Windows 8.1.  I'm old enough to have used every version of Windows since the very first version released by Microsoft in 1983 and this "upgrade" is in my experience by the far worst Microsoft has ever released.  The fact Microsoft doesn't even have the decency to acknowledge there is a problem is totally reprehensible and shows how arrogant this organization has now become.

The irony hasn’t been lost on me that Apple has also chosen the same time to release a new version of its OS, called Mavericks.  I installed this completely uneventfully on my MacBook Air in an hour one evening, whilst at the same time going through yet another round of updating drivers and disabling services to try and get 8.1 to install.  The experience with Apple couldn’t be more different and it really does make me think that my next desktop needs to be an Apple and not Microsoft based.  I have a business to run and just don’t have the time to play these stupid games that Microsoft seem happy for us all to endure.

I've progressed from having the 0x20017 error initially, but by updating my BIOS and all drivers to the latest versions available from the manufacturer’s websites, I now get the 0x40017 error appearing following the re-boot which occurs after the “Applying PC Settings” phase of the update.

No amount of disabling services and other software, including performing a “clean boot” as has been suggested by some, has made any difference at all.

Assuming the problems are being caused by incompatible drivers, what still remains to be explained by anyone – least of all Microsoft, is why a point release upgrade needs so many new drivers?  What has been changed in 8.1 so significantly that means 8.0 drivers will no longer work?  Everything I’ve read about the changes in 8.1 sound quite cosmetic, but there must be some much more fundamental “under the hood” changes that have been included.  It would help to know what these are, as is might identify the most likely drivers to be causing the problem.

For what it's worth, the configuration of my PC is below.  However if you look at the configurations other users with the 0x40017 error have, there seems to be very little in common between these machines.  Some are using Asus motherboards (like me), some are using Gigabyte, some are using nVidia video cards some are using AMD, some are using SSD’s, some are not, and so on.  There seems to be a completely random selection of hardware 8.1 won’t work with.

We as users shouldn’t be having to try and work this out.  Our computers are tools that should just work.  That certainly is Apple’s attitude, but Microsoft seems to have other ideas.  Only Microsoft have the ability to debug their own code, so they need to be doing this now as a matter of urgency.  If they already are, then why don’t they tell us that so we can be reassured that they do care about us poor users?  With the continuing silence are we correct to assume that Microsoft is doing absolutely nothing and we are all going to be left on a dead-end and flawed operating system: Windows 8.

In case anyone from Microsoft is monitoring this thread (sorry, but that seems unlikely) and it might help, here is the configuration of my PC:

Windows 8 Pro with Media Center

Processor         Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3930K CPU @ 3.20GHz, 3201 Mhz, 6 Core(s), 12 Logical Processor(s)           

Motherboard:  ASUS P9X79 Pro

BIOS Version/Date    American Megatrends Inc. 4404, 24/09/2013

Display adapter:  NVIDIA GeForce GTX670

SSD:  Corsair Neutron GTX

Installed Physical Memory (RAM)     32.0 GB

Network adapter:  Intel 82579V Gigabit

Audio:  Realtek High Definition Audio

Windows Directory    C:\Windows   

System Directory        C:\Windows\system32           

Boot Device    \Device\HarddiskVolume1    

Locale United Kingdom        

Hardware Abstraction Layer  Version = "6.2.9200.16442"  

Hyper-V - VM Monitor Mode Extensions     Yes     

Hyper-V - Second Level Address Translation Extensions     Yes     

Hyper-V - Virtualisation Enabled in Firmware          Yes     

Hyper-V - Data Execution Protection            Yes