We made the brave decision to be among the first to upgrade to Windows 10 and face all of the new OS's bugs. However, for some of us the upgrade was abruptly stopped, with an error 80240020. Let's see how to fix this error message and proceed with the upgrade.
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What is error 80240020?
The error 80240020 or 0x80240020 isn't unique to the Windows 10 upgrade. It is an error message for Windows update in general.
The official description of this error is that "the Automatic Update service cannot impersonate the logged-on user to finish downloading and installing the update".
This doesn't say much about why this error might be happening, especially when we want to upgrade to Windows 10 through Windows update.
In this context, error 80240020 means that there is something wrong with the Windows 10 installation folder, it might be unfinished or corrupted.
How to fix error 80240020
First, we need to go to Local Disk (C:) -> Windows -> SoftwareDistribution -> Download.
Inside, there will be a crapload of folders with weird names.
We need to select them all (with Ctrl+A) and delete them. Delete everything.
We will need to provide administrator permission...
...and wait a couple of minutes, because those folders contain tens of thousands of files.
After we have deleted everything, we need to open a command prompt with Administrator rights. Just search for CMD, right-click and "Run as administrator".
There, we type:
wuauclt.exe /updatenow
After that, we reopen Windows Update, and we should be good to go.
That didn't work
If the above solution didn't work for you, try to change the date of your PC to a couple of days later, this has helped several users.
If that still doesn't work, you can do the upgrade outside of Windows Update, using Microsoft's download tool. Or, even better, create a Windows 10 USB, so you can even upgrade Windows offline.
Did you get any other error messages?
If you had any other error messages beyond error 80240020 that you need help about, leave us a comment.
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