I have a Acer S7-391 laptop from 2013 (i7-3537U, 8GB Ram, 256 GB SSD). It originally came with windows 8, but was upgraded to Windows 10 years ago. The laptop was used basically only for light office work & browsing.
Some months ago I wanted to give it away, so I made an in-place Windows refresh. The refresh somehow failed, the system became unstable and I wasn’t able to sort things out with a Win 10 recovery USB-drive. At that moment, not having a bootable USB at hand, I left the PC on a shelf for a few months.
These days, I finally created a bootable USB drive, with Rufus. Tried both Win 10 and Win 11 (disabling HW checks) installers, both failed multiple times being stuck for hours, once at 17%, then at 11% etc. Precisely, Windows 10 is stuck on “Getting files ready for installation (4%)”. The installer hangs there for hours, the only way to move on is just to shut down the system.
I’ve erased all old partitions during install, letting the windows installer recreate them.
I’ve also tried to disable secure boot.
My question is: what is it that can make the Windows installer freeze? Could it be be a failing SSD, and could I check this by entering the command prompt during install? Other ideas on what should I check for, and how?
