Area-51 R4, Windows 11 disaster

Bad start: Ordered replacement hard drive so I could try 11 and easily go back.  Disk drive was scam or stolen by post office.

Bought another drive locally. Used Acronis to clone.  Swapped drives, booted and started the upgrade.  Went out to eat during the actual install but got back only in time to see the upgrade was reverting back to windows 10.

Looked at Event Viewer and tried to fix the problems by uninstalling the devices the win 11 upgrade reported it had problems with:

Uninstalled all XBOX.  Do not even have one.  XBOX bar was grayed out had to google how to uninstall.

Uninstalled Intel rapid technology and intel iastore drivers that were old duplicates.  I left the newer iastore drives in.  Had to use revo uninstaller as the older iastore were missing the uninstall ap;

Summery of what happened top down is Nov 17 bottom is Nov 16 looking at event logs:

---somewhere here i shut it down and it started a disk check
---start of a lot of apphang, appcrash, and failure to setr restore points
7:15am end of over 1000 msi installer info
7:10am msi installer info started again
---about 30 app hang "explorer"
11/17/2021 6:43 winlogin screen had no icons
11:13 last of maybe 1000 msi installer infos
10:42 more msiinststaller info
10:41 start of scattered NVidia display errors 10 of them
8:52 one of my apps attempted to veto a shutdown
4:47pm restart manager
--lot of outlook, security, database info
2:15pm end of maybe 1000 msiiinstaller info
1:54pm stared more msiinstaller info
--iastore error
--problems with search
--startup repair
1:49pm winlogon too too long warning
7:35 restart manager
===all msiinstaller info several 100
6:48 on 11/16

After making changes (uninstalls) the system would not boot and Alienware boot tried to do a lot of fixing, recovering and all the microsoft recovery selections showed up.

I put the original hard drive back in and same problem, windows did not boot and the same boot fixing was attempted by Alienware or Microsoft.  I have no idea why the original disk did not boot up.

I put the new disk back in as I did not want to have the original fooled with by the bios or Microsoft and after an hour or trying I managed to boot the new disk (not the original) after disabling secure boot and enabling legacy.

My bios has been set to use AHCI and not that intel rapid technology.  The M.2 has 256gb that is used by PrimoCache to speed up all other drives.  I had pulled other drives out before trying win11 upgrade.

What I am going to do:  Remove all startups that are unnecessary, disable primo cache and try again.