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

RAPrade 

QUOTE "I'm glad you took the time to read all of the posts.  It is a shame you failed to comprehend what you read.  If you had, it would be clear that many people are experiencing this error and failure on machines that do not fall into any of the categories you describe.  There would also be no valid reason why so many of the disparate problems you describe on wildly varying platforms would always end up with exactly the same error code. ... snip"

Maybe I should have repeated my first  line in a summery; " 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."

You are correct when you said;  "This error is most likely hardware related, or more correctly driver (software) related. " Nearly 80% of the posts bear that out.

I was not addressing, or denying  the obvious hardware/driver issues. Many people succeeded in updating by removing hardware or updating hardware drivers. I was only addressing the smaller percentage where that did not help.

For example: Two Acer Iconia tablets, right out of the box. One succeeded, the other failed. Turns out that these include an extra boot during the update because the BIOS is re-flashed during the update. If the BIOS is not updated, then there is a hardware (Firmware) incompatibility problem later in the update and it will fail and revert back to 8.0. Why did one fail? because the BIOS will not be reburned if the battery is below a certain value and the AC adapter is not plugged in. Turns out, I had not plugged in the adapter when I did the update. The BIOS update was skipped and in the next phase of the update, incompatible hardware features caused the failure. I simply plugged in the adapter and did the update again, successfully.

My test machine,  the one I updated successfully on the first try, is a 10 year old ASUS I rescued from a dumpster. I installed 8.0 and then updated it to 8.1 an additional 7 times while experimenting with different hardware, mostly different video cards,  cameras, external USB drives and a SanDisk SSD ReadyCache.

While my tests were not exhaustive, ( I certainly can't test even 1% of  the possibilities), I did discover a couple things. A faulty partition will be interpreted as a hardware failure, the disk fails a read write operation  This is even illustrated by a recent post describing a disk full error, although the writer did mention a slightly different error code. Many posts in this topic mention a different error code or not having seen the error.

Another thing I discovered is that the update, or even a fresh install of 8.0 does not rewrite the entire hard drive partition information. If the drive was a extended volume, (with or without errors) it will not convert it back to a basic volume, or repair a bad dynamic volume.

All I am trying to point out it that there were a growing number of posts in the last 20 pages that had tried all the "remove all extra hardware", and "install all updates" route and were still not successful.

That is the group I was addressing.

For those people, I noticed there was a large percentage of them that had "Cloned" drives or "cleaned up the Registry" or had unusual situations like drives larger than 2.2TB on non 64 bit processors. While they often supplied detailed lists of their hardware, none of them mentioned their exact partition information or how they set up the disk drives. Some did leave hints that seemed like red flags to me.

Yes, follow the guidance about removing all the extra hardware and installing drivers found in this topic. But for a few of you, when that does not work, take a look at the drives, drive types, partition tables, hard links, moved data files, Dynamic  volumes, and even how much data you have. Be aware that a "CLEAN INSTALL" should include removing all partitions on the boot drive.

For those of you still having problems, think back to the things that may have been done to your computer that might have contributed to a disk failure during an upgrade. Once you have eliminated all the possible causes, all that is left is the improbable causes.

Finally, upgraded to 8.1 on Thinkpad T400  (2764 CTO)!

Took a few tries, but what worked for me:

In BIOS, changed setting to Integrated Graphics, and told it not to check for Operating System Support of Switchable Graphics (T400 has both Intel integrated chip and Radeon 3400 HD). In original shipped state of Vista 32-bit, there were Lenovo-supplied utilities to switch on-the-fly to control power use).

Device Manager now reports ONLY the integrated graphics and things SEEM to be OK. I did have to manually activate Windows. Upgrade may be seeing this as new hardware or something, but it worled out.

To be clear, Switchable graphics was NOT supported by Lenovo beyond the originally-installed VISTA image. And everything worked fine as delivered. This is now an out-of-warranty, 4-year-old laptop that has been upgraded with additional RAM, first to Windows 7 64-bit, then to Windows 8 developer preview, then to Win8 Pro 64 with Media Player, and now to 8.1 Pro with Media Player. I skipped 8.1 preview on this machine, but had been using it on a Surface RT and was happy with it. On the T400 under Win 8 Pro, I had tweaked Win 7 drivers and such to restore most original functionality, including Bluetooth, on-screen display of special Thinkpad buttons, radio toggle, WiFi utilities, "air-bag" shock protection, TPM and fingerprint reader, etc. That took some trial and error. Once I had those things working, I backed off to use native Win8 functionality where available (e.g fingerprint reader). It was all pretty stable, but the 8.1 upgrade wouldn't work. Based on other posts here, I disconnected everything, clean-booted, then re-tried. When that did not work, I changed the BIOS settings for integrated graphics, and that did the trick.

What have I given up?

1. Switchable graphics -- but since my battery is 4-years old and I can't unplug, I don't need to switch
2. Radeon 3400 HD graphics -- but by today's standards, not that hot anyway. I don't use this laptop for gaming. I have it stuffed in a drawer in a docking station acting as my desktop. I use it when I need a few things I can't do on my Surface, but it is no longer "mission critical". Frankly, I am almost waiting for it to expire so that I have no choice but to upgrade.

I have also upgraded a couple of other older machines to 8.1 without any problems. 1) an HP 11-inch laptop (dmz1) that was an early AMD-based alternative to Atom-based netbooks (circa 2011), and 2) an original Dell XPS ONE all-in-one that is going on 5 years old if not more. They both fly, relatively, using 8.1. The XPS ONE in particular is a nice form-factor, and with an added Logitech wireless touch-pad, is almost like having a touch-screen. I just hope the power supply holds out -- becoming very rare and expensive.

I also have a MacBook Air that I use for work, but honestly (and this is not meant to bash) I'd rather be using Win 8.1 for everyday things.

Hope this helps someone.

Postscript: after upgrading, I tried to re-enable Switchable and Discrete graphics (Radeon 3400 HD) with an updated ATI driver set supposedly for 8.1 -- crashed so hard I had to enter bit-locker recovery key and restore to checkpoint. Did so, re-activated Windows via phone, and went back to integrated graphics. All running well so far. In the case of my old Lenovo, seems somehow related to this graphics and/or BIOS issue. I don't plan to chase this further, but if anyone else is trying to upgrade an older Thinkpad and runs into issues, hope this helps.

I had the blue screen as well.

For me it was the total size of my user files folders. As a copy is made of all your user files the installation will crash if the HDD isn't large enough to hold these twice.

It worked for me by backing up my user directories to another drive and then empty the content of the folders untill user directory wasn't 80GB any more but just 10GB.

Worked like a charm when I had done that. After install just copy the files back and you're upgraded.

Hope this helps...

Bob, your message helps but it still can't explain why my Surface Pro couldn't get upgraded, which is  a pure MS product. 

I actually had two Surface Pro and the one from work got upgraded successfully but my home machine had no luck. Tried many suggested method without success. BTW, my error code is slightly different: 0x3000D but I guess it doesn't matter.

I'm glad you took the time to read all of the posts.  It is a shame you failed to comprehend what you read.  If you had, it would be clear that many people are experiencing this error and failure on machines that do not fall into any of the categories you describe.  There would also be no valid reason why so many of the disparate problems you describe on wildly varying platforms would always end up with exactly the same error code.

This error is most likely hardware related, or more correctly driver (software) related.  I, like many others have more than one machine and the failure occurs on only one.  In my case I have two nearly identical machines that are a generation apart with an identical compliment of software installations, even down to the smallest utility programs, yet the older one works, the newer one fails.  The older one that upgrades without issue is running on a cloned system drive, while the newer one was an original clean install of Windows 8 on brand new hardware less than a few months ago.  The older is a dual-boot Win 7/Win8 box the newer was a fresh install of Win 8.  Both are Intel main boards, the older with a Z67 chipset and the newer with an X79 chipset.  The older with an AMD video card and the newer with Dual Nvidia 660 cards. Certainly all mainstream hardware.  The one that fails even fails with every single peripheral removed, any other add-in cards removed and a clean boot. 

The real issue is that Microsoft has issued what is only an incremental update that fails to install on what was a stable base installation of Windows 8. Further it fails without offering any valid or traceable error log clearly indicating what caused the failure.  This is a problem that Microsoft acknowledges and has not offered (or come up with) a solution.