Error 0x8007025d installing Windows 10

Last Updated on June 7, 2022 by Dave Farquhar

I was installing Windows 10 on an HP Z210 workstation and kept getting error 0x8007025. There’s not a lot of information about that error, so here’s how I fixed it.

Causes of error 0x8007025d

error 0x8007025d
I traced my problems installing Windows 10 to a marginal USB stick.

Error 0x8007025d isn’t well documented and can apparently be caused by more than one thing. But no one I know traced it to the problem I found. Kind of like my son’s Minecraft installation errors.

In my case, the problem was a marginal USB thumb drive. I pick up cheap USB thumb drives every time I go to Micro Center, and they usually work. But while this one had been fine for installing Debian, when I wrote the Windows 10 installation media to it, it wasn’t so fine. It booted, but it threw the error when it reached 31 percent. Consistently. And then it wouldn’t continue.

After I wrote the image to a different USB stick, the installation worked just fine.

USB flash drives do wear out over time, and honestly I don’t know how much I had used this one in particular. It’s still OK for copying files around, and that kind of makes sense. There’s more error checking going on and more chance to correct an error when you write individual files to a drive than when you write a bootable image to it. Yes, I’d installed Debian off that drive in the past but I may not have needed whatever file that image had on the drive’s bad block. Or maybe the block went bad in the process of writing the Windows 10 image to the drive.

I’ve generally had better luck installing operating systems from name-brand USB flash drives than from the cheap ones. They tend to be built with slightly better quality chips that don’t wear out as quickly and are more likely to be good in the first place.

Other causes of the error

I saw some other potential causes of the error, often due to the type of USB port in use, the SATA mode in use, or security features on the CPU. Windows 7 didn’t always like USB 3.0, so I wouldn’t be surprised if Windows 10 can struggle with it too.

But In my case, changing these items didn’t make any difference. Or they were irrelevant. This system doesn’t have USB 3.0.

I’ve also seen suggestions that random errors are caused by your computer being too old. That’s a bit of a cop-out. While the earliest dual-core CPUs are becoming marginal for running Windows 10, I’ve successfully installed Windows 10 on anything newer than a Pentium 4.

And while my HP Z210 is indeed getting up there in age, its i5-2500 is still faster than the entry level CPUs on the market today, and it has server-grade components inside, and it can take 16 GB of RAM. If I put a Xeon in it, it could take 32 GB. Once I got past the error, it runs Windows 10 very well.

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