More generally, Apple was providing working OS upgrades for years while the notion of upgrading Windows between major versions was basically laughable. Wasn't Windows 8 the first version of Windows that you could actually upgrade to and have the system boot successfully? Maybe Vista to 7 worked for people. I never bothered trying. But I remember upgrading from OS X 10.3 to 10.4 and being floored when everything just worked.
That's a cool little project, but it runs counter to almost every Windows upgrade I've ever performed. The natural bit rot of long running windows installations has always made a fresh install a much stronger guarantee of success than an upgrade.
My guess is that it's the keeping around of third-party drivers made for the previous OS that causes the majority of upgrade "rot."
If older editions of Windows just forcibly purged all the drivers when you upgraded, and told you to reinstall them afresh from the installation CD/OEM site (where you'd then get a version that's maybe for your current OS instead), that could have saved everyone quite a few headaches.
Then again, with major peripherals (displays, keyboards/mice, Ethernet cards, USB controllers) being much less standard than today, ripping out the OEM's driver could wedge your computer.
Certainly. I honestly never even expected a Windows update to be guaranteed to succeed simply because the surface area for them to test is unimaginably large - the same was not true for Macs (at least once OS X got good), so when a Mac OS upgrade failed I was generally more surprised.
i have upgraded (or my dad had anyways) from win 3.11 to win 95 and win 95 to 98. i think i clean installed win xp when i got a new computer but eventually i upgraded that to win 7.
all of them ran fine. or was that just not the norm?
Windows 3.x, 95, 98 and ME all used the DOS FAT filesystem (or the extended FAT32 variant). Windows XP supported both FAT and NTFS so if you did a clean install you were probably using NTFS.
What iOS 10.3 did was basically the equivalent of having a Windows upgrade which converted FAT/FAT32 to NTFS in-place without the user having to manage the process.
Windows XP did actually include a built in FAT32 to NTFS upgrade tool. Of course, you did have to run it manually from a command line, but I never had a failure from it. Vista would convert automatically if it saw a FAT boot drive, and I think Windows 2000 would upgrade FAT16 to 32.
I wonder if Apple will take the same approach for macOS (convert manually if you want for now, or we'll use it if you reinstall). Seems like a far greater risk for Apple if upgrading the OS breaks something for a lot of people, when they want users to be completely comfortable about updates.
It definitely worked on the boot partition at least on XP, not sure about 2k. If it can’t lock the drive it schedules it to be done at boot time (similar to on-boot chkdsk).
If you, personally, were reasonably good about general computer hygiene, your odds of success in upgrading would go up considerably. The average computer user, however (sample size of the hundreds of people I interacted with during the years when I did IT consulting for individuals and small businesses) did not have the faintest idea what they were doing, and it was likely that an upgrade would fail for one reason or another.
I think my failure rate got to about 30% before I stopped even trying to run the upgrade and just did a fresh install after backing everything up.
More generally, Apple was providing working OS upgrades for years while the notion of upgrading Windows between major versions was basically laughable. Wasn't Windows 8 the first version of Windows that you could actually upgrade to and have the system boot successfully? Maybe Vista to 7 worked for people. I never bothered trying. But I remember upgrading from OS X 10.3 to 10.4 and being floored when everything just worked.