This is a valid question and a serious concern for many of us. Instead of suggesting work-around solutions, please kindly double check and let rest of us know, before going for such a dual boot situation.
I doubt this is the case. The update servers are probably just overloaded. If they had a problem with the win7 upgrade stuff, they will likely fix it shortly.
Ive actually broke down and let win7 machines sit for 10 minutes trying to get updates, and then reboot them and then go back to WU. Works most of the time, otherwise just have to wait it out. Update servers are probably getting slammed by a lot with people getting their win7 systems ready for win10, and others going back to win7 from win10 hehe
Did you check task manager to see if the process is hanging? WU service uses one of the svchost processes for me and even before upgraing to w10, sometimes it's stuck on 50% cpu for like 10 minutes
I have tested this morning a fresh W7 installation and checked the genuine test, in fact the download and installation process took about 10 mn to lead me to Microsoft page and after the genuine test it took more than 15mn to download the updates. For me m$ servers are too busy at the moment.
I downgraded from windows 10 to windows 7 via formatting the HD. I had not done a complete fresh install for a long time and decided this is the time and at the same time had re partition the HD to a different size. Upon installation windows 7 activated without DAZ loader. For 2 days no windows update up to now. Still trying
Just think about it for a second. It's estimated Windows 7 holds about 60% share of all home operating systems installed worldwide. That number easily runs into the billions. Billions of computer, most of them attached to the internet. People decide to try Windows 10, want to go back, and end up fresh installing Windows 7. Most of them are probably using the old ISO files that don't include most of the updates, thus they must download around a GB of updates. For every million users, that's around an Exabyte of data. Servers are probably overloaded. Estimated only 15% of the OS share goes to Windows 8/8.1, and I believe more 8/8.1 users will stick with Windows 10 than Windows 7 users. That's my best guess. I feel like Windows 7 updates always took a long time though.
I installed Windows 7 Ultimate x64 BIE into a virtual machine... That version is the original Windows 7 release (no patches)... Windows Update loaded nearly immediately after an update and found available patches... I installed SP1 by itself and then restarted, let Windows Update run again and Boom... It stalled... It has something to do with SP1...