The Issue
Trying to do an In Place Windows 10 Upgrade with McAfee DLP Endpoint fails. As soon as the Operating System is applied the machine restarts and simply starts up to the “Repair” screen.
The Investigation
In this case the In Place Upgrade was being performed by System Center Configuration Manager using an In Place Upgrade Task Sequence. This means we have some logs to go through.
After digging in smsts (%windir%\ccm\logs\smsts.log) we could see there was an extra switch added to the Windows 10 Setup.exe file.
This parameter is what is required by McAfee for you to complete your upgrade and can be viewed on their website – https://kc.mcafee.com/corporate/index?page=content&id=KB89000.
There is also a great article by a Microsoft MVP – https://www.anoopcnair.com/in-place-os-upgrade-on-mcafee-encrypted-machines-using-sccm-ts/
But even after reviewing the settings were correct the upgrade was still failing. So it was time to go look a little deeper, the Panther file.
If you do not know what the Panther file is, it is basically a folder that contains some helpful files for troubleshooting Windows upgrades. The location of this folder can differ so have a look at this link – https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/927521/windows-vista-windows-7-windows-server-2008-r2-windows-8-1-and-windows
The Panther directory mostly looks something like the below,
To me the two most helpful files in the Panther directory, to me, is always
1. ActionableReport.html
and
2. CompatData_xxxxxxxxxxxx.XML
The Solution
As we could see in the Actionable Report and the XML File it was clearly still DLP Endpoint causing a “Hard” block and “UpgradeBlock”. So we pointed our efforts in that direction. After some minor review of this article we figured out the DLP Endpoint version was not compatible for this upgrade to Windows 10 1809. Refer to below table and link.
After updating to a supported version the upgrade went through successfully.
If you have anything to add or would like to correct me in any of the steps please reach out and I will be happy to discuss.