Fix - Dell Venue 8 Pro Windows 10 Fall update gets stuck at 40%

My Dell Venue 8 Pro that I primarily use as an e-reader was the last of the flock to get the update... so after gone trough the plight of getting about 8GB of data free to be able to actually start the Fall update... it got stuck at 40%. Twice, actually. It was installing a whole night but never passed 40%.

The root cause appeared to be an SD card. The fix is pretty easy.

1. Hold the power button till your DV8P powers down
2. Once it has shut down, pop out the SD card
3. Power it up again.
4. It will now restore your previous version of Windows, that is, the Windows 10 RTM 10240. Wait for that complete (should be a few minutes)
5. Follow this procedure as described by Rod Trent on the SuperSite for Windows
6. The update will now complete (fingers crossed)
7. Once it's done, login and pop in your SD card again.

At the original writing of this article I was thinking "I have read this somewhere before, but where"? Neither Google or Bing yielded any results. The odd thing is my Surface Pro 1 upgraded flawlessly, although it does have SD card too.

Maybe I did not search thoroughly enough, because a day later the writer of this blog (in Dutch) pointed out he posted the same thing before I did. The post recounts a twitter conversation between Gabe Aul and Mary Jo Foley about popping the SD card on upgrade. I probably have seen the  conversation in my timeline and subconsciously registered it. I admit prior art ;) but I will leave this post up because I think it makes the solution easier to find.

Re-enabling the Hanselman trick to easily switch between Hyper-V and VirtualBox after Windows 10 Fall update

Since my first forays into Xamarin I have been making great use of this awesome trick by Scott Hanselman to quickly change from a configuration with Hyper-V (for Windows Phone and Windows 10 Mobile development) and Virtual Box (for using emulators based upon VirtualBox. I created this dual-boot option in Windows 8.1, and it survived the upgrade to Windows 10 RTM 10240 in July.

After updating to the Windows 10 Fall update (aka 1511, aka 10586.3) I found out I had two boot option in my boot screen - "Windows 10" and "Windows 10", both with Hyper-V enabled.

Bummer.

Fortunately, this is easy to fix.

1. Open an admin command prompt
2. Enter bcdedit.
   You will get a list of three entries, the first one "Windows Boot Manager" (ignore that) and two called "Windows Boot Loader"
3. Check that both have an entry "hypervisorlaunchtype" set to "Auto"
4. Both boot loaders description "Windows10" and will have an identifier. One will be a {current}, the other a GUID like identifier, like {3bca20f3-367f-11e5-9da7-f5ee60b7b905}. That is the one you can change.
5. Enter bcdedit /set {your-guid-here} description "No Hyper-V"
6. Enter  bcdedit /set {your-guid-here} hypervisorlaunchtype off

If your reboot now, you will once again have two options, one with description Hyper-V, the other still called Windows 10

Caveat emptor: playing around with the boot editor can seriously mess up your system. Be sure of what you are doing. Even I usually stay away from this as much as possible. Worked on my machine - I cannot accept any responsibility for it not working on yours :)