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

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.

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