I am stuck on Canary build 25393.1. Please help! It will expire in a few days :(

[Aaron_R]

Hi,

My computer will not upgrade after this build for the last 3 canary builds. After the update installs and the machine does its first reboot, it gets stuck at the Windows boot logo. Manually restarting the machine makes windows revert back to the current build I am on. Is there a way to fix this?

[#2]

Thanks for sharing the issue Aaron!

Wondering when it rebooted into the previous OS, did it show any errors ?

Thanks,

Shawn

[#3]

Hi Shawn@Deleted ,

There is no error that shows up. During the boot process, you only see the Windows boot logo and that's it, the loading animation does not start. Once you manually restart the computer it will boot back to Windows as if nothing has happened (Does a quiet rollback during boot). No errors at all can be found as a notification, settings updates do not complain, it just asks to install the latest insider build. The Event logs show nothing about it either. All I have is the Setuperr.log and the updates logs that I pulled with Powershell. They do not show anything I can specifically point to.

[#4]

Well, so much for the community help! What a pointless place. In any case, I think I have a clue as to what the problem might be. After the version I have, the next build was a huge jump in build number and it included a new requirement: 'Popcnt'. This is a SSE4.2 instruction set on the CPU. I cannot see what part of Windows 11 is using this so if anyone can point to what WIndows 11 uses this for, I could remove it from future builds which will get me out of this hole! I only have 1 day now until this image expires....

[#5]

@Aaron_R  

I understand, but this is a common problem and there is really no official information that I know.

This is one of the discussions please see this and let me know, what do you think?

Re: Problem in windows 11 insider preview - Microsoft Community Hub

Yesterday the latest ISO was released - you can download and update in place.

Announcing Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 25951 (Canary Channel) | Windows Insider Blog

[#6]

Thanks A1. You can see the big jump from my build 25393 to the next build of 25905. From this build onwards, I have not been able to upgrade on any revision since. This popcnt requirement was introduced on build 25905 and onwards. If I can find out which new feature they have added that requires this, then I can remove it / disable it from the image so I can successfully upgrade. Otherwise, I am stuck with an expired OS which I have been upgrading from since WIndows XP x64 image.

[#7]

@Aaron_R  

I don't know the answer to this question, but updating using ISO - or did it cause an Error?

[#8]

The only way I can update the Windows 11 image to remove the problem is by knowing which feature uses popcnt in Windows 11? Otherwise, I am stuck. For example, bitlocker requires TPM. I can disable the use of bitlocker. If I knew what uses popcnt, then I could disable that so Windows 11 does not try to invoke it when booting after an upgrade...

[#9]

@Aaron_R 

Announcing Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 25314 | Windows Insider Blog

LSA - but I'm just guessing 🙂  

This is an excerpt from this Blog:

"

Introducing LSA Protection Enablement on Upgrade
Local Security Authority (LSA) protection helps protect against theft of secrets and credentials used for logon by preventing unauthorized code from running in the LSA process and by preventing dumping of process memory. Starting with on upgrade, we will audit for a period of time to check for incompatibilities with LSA protection. If we do not detect any incompatibilities, we will automatically turn on LSA Protection. You can check and change the enablement state of LSA protection in the Windows Security application under the Device Security > Core Isolation page.

"

[#10]

That is a nice spot, that was enabled on a revision or so before my current build. I am unsure if this would affect the builds after in such a drastic way. Otherwise, it would have prevented me from getting on the current build I am stuck on... I could not see anything on the blogs of the later builds either...