Medion P6624 - Windows 10 Install Guide

Here is a definitive upgrade guide for the Medion P6624 for going from Windows 7 or Windows 8 to Windows 10. This step-by-step guide gets you through all the hoops of the actual Windows 10 upgrade installation, and then fixes driver issues once Windows 10 is installed.

Step 1.
Remove the battery, but keep the power cable in.

Step 2.
Start the Windows 10 upgrade. This image shows the upgrade that starts with the Windows 10 Media Creation Tool. The same information here goes for the Windows Update/GWX update method.

Let it go through the all the inital stages. The Medion P6624 will restart, let it go. This sequence events will happen:

Step3.
When the first stage, Copying Files, has finished and the Upgrading Windows percentage hits 30%, the Medion P6624 will restart.
When it restarts and the BIOS screen is presented, pull out the power cable.

Step 4.

Reconnect the power cable, and power up the computer.

Then the second stage of the installation will kick off (without this plug trick, it will hang).

Step 5.
At the end of the "Installing features and drivers" stage, at around 75%, the Medion P6624 will restart again.
When it restarts and the BIOS screen is presented, pull out the power cable.

Step 6.
Reconnect the power cable, and power up the computer.

The third and final stage will now continue.

Installation of Windows 10 complete.

With Windows 10 installed, there are two more things to do.

1. Replace the default USB3 driver, it causes a hang on restart. The default Windows 10 driver has the same issues as the Windows 8 driver on the Medion P6624. It's fine from a cold start, but system restarts cause lockups.
2. Replace the default nVidia driver, it crashes Direct X on the Medion P6624. The default 353.62 nVidia Windows 10 driver has the same issues as the Windows 8 driver on the Medion P6624 - DirectX applications hang instantly.

Step 7.
Install this USB3 Reneasas driver from Intel.
Install the Nvidia Geforce 344.65 drivers from NVidia.

Done! Enjoy.

not that sort of N-Joi

Conclusions.
With these installed, your Medion P6624 running Windows 10 should restart without hanging, and the Geforce GT425M in it should run DirectX applications without crashing.

I have to thank user DS_POS from this thread (warning, it's in German) for making the logical extension of my previous findings with Windows 8. I think the BIOS in the Medion P6624 needs work. My very strong suspicion is that it has something to do with the RESTART state, and the USB3 controller. I saw someone say they could Disable Legacy USB in the BIOS and get the same result, but when I did that, I couldn't boot at all.
As for the NVidia Geforce GT425M problem, I'm at a loss to explain that. I think that is simply a driver issue with NVidia, but using the very latest NVidia drivers still does not work so stick with 344.65 and IGNORE all advice to upgrade for now.

Happy upgrading!

The Medion P6624 and Windows 10... a work in progress

Update 25th August, 2015:

Success! I now enter this update from a Medion P6624 running Windows 10.

Details here.

Original Post:
To those out there who've seen my Windows 8.1 Pro installation instruction/help guide, I want you to know that I'm giving the Windows 10 upgrade a crack.




I'm attempting at first to use the live upgrade GWX tool.. you know, the one that Microsoft pushed out to everyone around April 2015, running Windows 7 or above with an icon that looks like this:

it seems to just hook in with Windows Update.

Anyway, so far, no good. Everything starts fine, there is a reboot initially. The installer presents a screen after reboot, saying it's installing Windows 10, and it is doing the copy stage..
Once that is done, it reboots.
It is at this step that things go wrong.
It boots, I see the old Windows 8 style screen, some twirly dots, and then they go away. Then it does "nothing", as far as I can tell. It eerily smacks of the "reboot hang" that I saw when I first fresh installed Windows 8 on this Medion P6624 (see last post on this blog). That was caused by the default USB3 driver in Windows 8. I hope to earth that the Windows 10 live upgrade doesn't replace the driver during the initialisation stages of the live upgrade process. Otherwise we are never going to get it installed - at least not the easy free way.

This is what I see...

...for about 8 hours. That is as long as I've left it. I could leave it longer I guess...

Anyway, the Medion is *hot*, so the CPU is working hard doing what visibly amounts to nothing, nothing at all (no twirly balls or anything).
At this stage, the only other option is to hard reset. Hold down the power button for 5 seconds. Afterward, the system boots, I see a super quick flash of a window. There's a title on the window, but I always miss what is running, it's something.exe. I suspect its the WinPE environment that loads all this installation. Immediately after this, I see "recovering installation", and then I get a black screen with the blue windows logo (as above) but no twirly dots at all, and nothing else. I guess I could leave that for another 8 hours, but I haven't.

After another hard reset, I see another super quick flash of a window, presumably the same thing that ran after the first hard reset. After that, I see this:

This happens every time, so I have now classified this particular outcome (Windows boot screen, no sign of twirly ball activity) a "hang" or "lock up".

I attempted the installation no more than 5 times, with the same result.

At least Windows 8.1Pro is restored to the PC. Bravo Microsoft. At least you do leave me with a working PC so dont need to use Clonezilla to get working again, that would take much longer.

Update 12/08/2015 9pm

The media creation tool method to install windows has the same problems. After I do a hard reset (hold down P6624's power button for 5 seconds) twice, it restores Windows 8.1 Pro. After that, the media creation tool least it provides *some* information. Here's what I'm presented with:

at least this is something to go with for now...

0xC1900101 - 0x30017

The installation failed in the FIRST_BOOT phase with an error during BOOT operation.

This error could be one of two things:

1. The actual problem that is causing the hang, or

2. Me hard resetting the PC because it doesn't seem to do anything, like, forever.

I have only done this once so far, but since it was the same result as the GWX version, I didn't see the point.

Hmmm. I'm not sure what to do next.