Windows 10 setup paused at the "Preparing the system" stage.
Windows 10 setup paused at the "Preparing the system" stage.
Attempting to upgrade from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 using the installation media, I accepted the terms and conditions. Now I’m stuck on a loading screen that says "Getting a few things ready." It’s been around 8 hours. I’ve cleaned the PC, disabled antivirus and firewalls, and tried running the installer as admin, but nothing changes. Please help!
Have you attempted a system restart? Consider reinstalling the Windows installation media from the official website. Ensure your storage capacity is sufficient, as limited space can significantly slow down performance and disrupt functionality. If you need additional storage, reach out to Microsoft support—they assisted me when upgrading from Windows 10 version 1803 to 1903 due to insufficient clearance space. As a note, you can close the window and let it resolve issues on its own; in some cases, restarting resolved problems. If it persists, you may need to discard the device or contact support.
I noticed preparing everything took more than 40 hours on a $250 machine with a very weak AMD APU and a slow hard drive. I’d suggest waiting a day or two to see if things improve.
It's quite awkward I haven't restarted my PC (I usually don’t check that for fixes), but I’ll give it a shot now since I think 80GB on my C drive is plenty. And honestly, if rebooting doesn’t help, I’m not sure what else to do except wait and hope it works. Thanks!
What amount of memory do you have? On computers with limited RAM, downloading the 200 updates on Windows 7 often took a long time or didn’t complete at all, which might be similar to what’s happening now.
It was a tough fix, but turning it off and on again saved me a lot of time. I’ll never get back 10 hours of my life like that.
8 GB is sufficient, I understand. It may seem tedious at first, but the outcome was successful. Be pleased you reached your goal, even if it might have seemed more challenging later on.
In fact, for future reference, if anyone else encounters this issue, it might have been clearing disk space that resolved the problem. I had only 20GB free while it wasn’t working, so I cleared my C drive until it had 80GB free and then it functioned properly. Otherwise, it was just a reboot.
Win10 requires roughly 20gbs of storage, which suggests the update was likely the actual solution. If you didn’t install it from an external source like a flash drive, it probably needed additional space to store its installation files.