EDIT: ***SOLVED*** See my edit at the bottom or my follow-up comment.

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I've been working at this all day, finding countless forum posts on this issue.

A couple months ago I noticed that my Windows Security screen was blank. See image:

Blank security Screen.

I went through several troubleshooting steps but was never able to recover it, still to this day. This was before I had installed Malwarebytes, so it wasn't because of a third-party antivirus. I was checking services, enabling services, and realized some were missing and that the only fix was to do an upgrade in place. I put it off, since everything else on the machine was functioning properly and in the meantime I used Malwarebytes (currently uninstalled it due to attempts at upgrading.)

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Today I started trying to finally do an upgrade in place, I have Windows 10 Home Edition, when I started at the beginning of the day I was on version 20H2. Before doing the upgrade in place I decided to try and just do a normal Windows update from Settings>Update & Security>Windows Update, it found an update (21H1) and installed it.

Now in my research, I've discovered that the most recent version of Windows is version 21H2, but my Settings>Update & Security>Windows Update shows that I'm up to date. See image:

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Windows shows I'm up to date.

Now in even more stumbling around my various menus in Settings>System>About under Windows specifications it shows that my version was installed on October 12th, 2998?! This seems so off to me, I checked in my Settings>Time & Language>Date & time and the time there is proper and synced with the windows time server. See images:

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Incorrect install date? Or am I reading it wrong?

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Date and time are correct.

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I'm not sure if these issues have anything to do with the upgrade failing, but if anything they make it even more of a reason for me to get this upgrade in place working.

Here's a list of things I've tried:

running /sfc scannow.

running /dism and its various utilities to check my disk image health.

Installing from an ISO of Win10 21H2.

Creating an install media and installing from that.

Creating a new user account on this PC and trying to do the install from there.

Clean boot of windows.

Ensuring UEFI Secure Boot was off.

Disabling all windows features.

Unplugging all devices except monitor, mouse, and keyboard.

Updating motherboard BIOS.

Updating my graphics card driver.

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Every time, to no avail, Windows runs the installation and everything goes smoothly, it then restarts, and continues from 0% to about 30% or so, then restarts and continues from 30% to 48%, the screen flashes (which makes me think that it's enabling some video drivers) and the resolution changes from a 16:9 aspect ratio to a 21:9 aspect ratio (I have an ultrawide) and then it hangs at 48%. I've left this for several hours and when the upgrade hangs, the drive activity light on my front panel reports no drive activity, which tells me something is very wrong.

Windows boots up again and gives me this error:

We couldn’t install Windows 10.

We’ve set your PC back to the way it was right before you started installing Windows 10.

0xC1900101 - 0x30018

The installation failed in the FIRST_BOOT phase with an error during SYSPREP operation

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Here are my specs:

Windows 10 Home

CPU: Intel i7-9700K

Motherboard: MPG Z390 GAMING EDGE AC

Graphics Card: RTX 2070 Super

Boot Drive: 500GB WD Blue SATA SSD M.2 2280 (WDS500G2BOB) (50GB Available)

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I appreciate any and all help as this problem is starting to drive me crazy! If you need any more info on my specs please let me know.

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EDIT: SOLVED!

I'm not exactly sure what the exact fix was but in addition to everything I did above these are the things I did right before the successful update:

1. Ran chkdsk /f in an elevated command prompt, restarted and it ran.
2. Ran chkdsk /r in an elevated command prompt, restarted and ran (steps 1 and 2 at the suggestion of u/Root4789)
3. Created a new temporary admin account via elevated command prompt detailed in below steps.

In an elevated command prompt typed and pressed enter

net user "Temp Account" /add

("Temp Account" can be anything you want to name it, just leave the quotations.)

then typed the following and pressed enter.

 net localgroup administrators "Temp Account" /add 

1. After the above I signed out of the account I was on and loaded into the new Temp Account.

2. I then downloaded the windows installation media creator and created an ISO of the current version of windows.

3. Mounted the ISO then ran through the prompts, opted not to get downloads and updates, made sure "Keep my Files and Apps" was checked.

4. Clicked install and unplugged my ethernet cable.

SO glad I got this upgraded!

Step 3-6 I followed from here: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/windows-10-20h2-update-frozen-at-48/32ad4c04-3fdb-455d-ad7f-00bcb729cff8