If you’re experiencing this error when trying to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10, and also seeing this plain text error ” SAFE_OS phase error during Replicate_OC operation ” you could be encountering issues with what Windows 10 has now tagged as incompatible hardware.

Before you move into the next step, you should ensure you have covered the basics in trying to resolve the error. Quickly run through: Cleaning up the disk with Windows cleanup utility, clearing out the BT folder, rebooting, trying an ISO based installation or USB based installation, updating all drivers, removing AV apps, removing unnecessary hardware from the machine temporarily and so on.

You can resolve this by simply downloading old Windows 10 images from other web sources. We recommend locating a copy of 1607 or 1511 from trusted third parties or your own inventory backup versions. From there, use Rufus to create a new USB installation selecting the MBR formatting and running the Windows 10 upgrade from there. After the initial install, you can use the Windows 10 update assistant to get yourself up to Windows 10 1909 (the most current stable release at the time of this writing).

Keep up to date whenever you can in this day and age.