I did a fresh install of 7 Ultimate release on my old eMachines PC fine. Everything worked - no problem. I then did the Windows 10 upgrade but when finished, i had no network connection even though the Realtek RTL8139 driver was working properly according to device manager. I tried putting in a USB Network adapter, but there was no USB drivers and device manager said USB Mass Storage Device was missing. Then i tried doing a fresh install of Windows 10 from a bootable USM stick. The install started but then said there were no USB drivers available. What a F#@^ing hassle! How can i get this thing updated to Windows 10? I thought since Windows 7 worked perfectly, The Windows 10 upgrade would be smooth. i did two other PC upgrades with no problem. Any idea what the issue is with my network and USB? The Emachines web site only have drivers for Vista for the most recent.
Did you run the upgrade adviser? It would have told you if there were driver incompatibilities that the device manufacturer needs to address.
Make a bootable USB flash drive formatted in NTFS for BIOS install, you can use the MS media tool or a soft like RUFUS, don't use a USM stick. You might need to buy a newer USB network ADPT. Can you open devise MGR for the RTL8239, go to properties and hardware ID, post the ID, to see if any of the 8 or 10 drivers for 81XX has the driver for your 8139. It's old.
go to device manager and remove it and restart . does it work ? no? k then try setting it in advanced tab of device manager to 100 full or 10 full. not working? replace that old lan with PCI or usb.
Thanks for the suggestions. I will try them tonight. I don't want to invest any money in new hardware since this is an old machine that i intend to sell. If I can't get Win10 installed i'll just leave it at Win7. I did not run the upgrade advisor. Where is that? I did try removing the Network adapter but i didn't restart the computer before scanning for changes. I reverted back to Windows 7 and all worked, but when i tried the upgrade again - same problems. I did try a fresh install using a bootable 32GB USB stick with win10 installed but it only got so far before telling me it didn't have USB drivers. Not sure what you mean. I have the Realtek RTL8139/810x
The upgrade adviser is built in to the "Get Windows 10" app that should have shown up in the notification bar. It will tell you any hardware or software that is known to not work.
I'm with Odie that You'll need to try installing off a USB drive after "burning" it with Rufus. I haven't updated it to the new build, but I'm running Win 10 Pro x64 Build 10240 on an even older eMachines W3503 running 2x512 RAM at 333. No problems with the Ethernet or using a USB Wi-Fi dongle. Not the fastest Rig around, but still has better performance than the XP SP3 MCE OS that it was running before.
If you look at the rest of the sentence, you'll see 8139, didn't mean to type 8239. There's a set of drivers, but they are listed as RTL81XX, which means they are a series of different models, but it's not every 81, and because your 8139 is old they might not be there, that's why I asked to post the hardware ID so I can check the drivers.
But you posted you tried to install with a USM stick, which is a different monster. That system has USB 2.0, and if there were no USB drivers, it wouldn't even see the install or the flash drive let alone start it and then say it. Where did you get the windows 10 ISO ? There's no reason to get that message when windows has those drivers.
Having no USB is extremely weird. Sure there's no strange BIOS option preventing it from working? I guess one thing you can try is pulling the system disk, putting it into another system, and loading the drivers onto the drive that way.
So.... I wiped my hard drive and reinstalled Win 7 Ultimate. All is good. I ran the upgrade adviser and it said everything passed and I am ready for the upgrade. So i let windows do the upgrade to windows 10 thing but one of the screens during the beginning of the upgrade noted that my ATI Radeon Express 200(?) grafics card will have problems with Windows 10. Nothing was noted about the network adapter or the USB. I let the upgrade continue but when it finished - no network or USB! The device manager said the network adapter was working Fine. The USB Mass storage Controller was unknowm and the text next to it read something like Unable to reset device. What gives? How can a common thing like USB not work with an upgrade when the Upgrade adviser didn't even flag it? I am really starting to get ticked off and now it's more of a determination to resolve this more than anything. I don't even care about the computer since i'm getting rid of it anyway but it bothers me that Win 10 doesn't work. Maybe I'll try putting Win 8.1 on and upgrade from there? Maybe Win8.1 won't work either.