In case anyone comes across the problem where you're trying to upgrade Windows 7 to Windows 10 and it fails at SAFE_OS MIGRATE_DATA stage, I have run into this a few times now and have a couple of potential solutions.
First, a tech friend of mine tells me that he solved his issues when he ran into it by fixing the user profiles in the registry. We've all seen the issue with a corrupt profile registry key, I'm sure. You go to the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
And you look for 2 profiles with the same name, but one has .BAK after it. Delete the duplicate and remove the .BAK from the second one (make a backup first, of course).
But that didn't work for me on this last one. It took a while to track down, but I finally found leftover traces of an old Avast install in the registry. I ran AvastClear and then manually deleted what was left. Then, just for good measure, I ran an SFC, CHKDSK and Windows Update Troubleshooter, all except CHKDSK I had already tried before.
Apparently some older versions of Avast are completely incompatible with Windows 10. I had one last week which wouldn't upgrade because they had a Backup folder on their desktop with an old Program Files backup from an old install on their last computer (I didn't do that, just so you know that I don't make sloppy backups like that). In this case I had already checked for files, even doing a search on the entire hard drive. It was the registry entries which were the problem, apparently.
First, a tech friend of mine tells me that he solved his issues when he ran into it by fixing the user profiles in the registry. We've all seen the issue with a corrupt profile registry key, I'm sure. You go to the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
And you look for 2 profiles with the same name, but one has .BAK after it. Delete the duplicate and remove the .BAK from the second one (make a backup first, of course).
But that didn't work for me on this last one. It took a while to track down, but I finally found leftover traces of an old Avast install in the registry. I ran AvastClear and then manually deleted what was left. Then, just for good measure, I ran an SFC, CHKDSK and Windows Update Troubleshooter, all except CHKDSK I had already tried before.
Apparently some older versions of Avast are completely incompatible with Windows 10. I had one last week which wouldn't upgrade because they had a Backup folder on their desktop with an old Program Files backup from an old install on their last computer (I didn't do that, just so you know that I don't make sloppy backups like that). In this case I had already checked for files, even doing a search on the entire hard drive. It was the registry entries which were the problem, apparently.
