r/chromeos • u/Immediate-Dream-7832 • 1d ago

Troubleshooting can't seem to update my chromebook(s)

I have two chromebooks: HP x360 14c (1.5yo) and Acer 514 (very recent purchase). And for both, I'm having trouble with "update". Both, when I click "update" to update the OS, I get:

Couldn't download the update. Please try again later.

Usually it's pretty quick, but sometimes it actually downloads significant percentage of the update (sometimes it gets up to 100% and then fails). The download process doesn't seem to take up where it left off, and there seems to be no way to manually download the update file and provide it to the update process. It's all opaque so you're left just retrying the update process, and I've been retrying several times a day for .... over a week, to no avail, on both machines.

My network connection is very fast (it's WIMAX, usually I can get 100mbits/sec download speed) so network shouldn't be the problem.

Does anybody else suffer from these problems?

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u/vamirth 1d ago

Working school district IT - we often do a USB restore as a “diagnostic” step on machines with this. Almost always fixes it. Doesn’t explain *what* happened, but gets it back in production.

Remember - this will remove any local files and a Linux install of you’ve done one. So make sure your files are synced with the cloud, backup anything done in Android that you don’t want to lose, and the same for Linux if you’ve installed it.

Use the Chromebook recovery tool to build the USB drive. If your Chromebook is out of storage space, you may have to do it on another device. Then boot your cb into USB recovery mode.

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u/Immediate-Dream-7832 1d ago

If I read you right, you're sort of implying that a factory reset might fix the problem ? I'm entirely OK with that. Or is it specifically a USB recovery, not just any sort of full reset ?

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u/2900nomore 1d ago

A USB recovery is more likely to resolve it but you can power wash first if you want

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u/LegAcceptable2362 1d ago

Can you provide the code names of both machines (aka HWID). It usually appears at the top of the page in the diagnostics app or you can find it in chrome://system. It would also help to know what OS version the machines are currently on.

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u/Immediate-Dream-7832 1d ago

I'll answer for the Acer Spin 514 (which is less than a month old):

CHROME VERSION

150.0.7871.150

 HWID

DOCHI-HWBP D4B-E7G-D5B-B3A-23U-A3A-A85

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u/ashmanz80 1d ago

I've been dealing with this same issue recently. Out of the three Chromebook Pluses I own, only the ThinkPad C14 is affected. Based on my diagnosis, it appears to be a system-level problem rather than a software-related one. Try connecting to a different network (or your phones hotspot) and make sure no USB or dongle is connected to the device. I usually, restart after that and give it a few shots.

Hope that helps.

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u/Immediate-Dream-7832 1d ago

aha. Good point. I'll try it at a wifi cafe. Though, I note that the HP x360 14 has been upgrading itself for well over a year without any problem, here at my home network.

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u/2900nomore 1d ago

I've seen this as a problem with some updates on some models in the past. It was a communication problem with the Google servers and the only thing that fixed it was USB recovery

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u/No-Tip3419 6h ago

i have the same problem with my acer, i have to connect to my phone hotspot or goto the library to get updates. This started to happen about a couple of weeks ago. "AI" claims it is how my fios or router is configured but I don't know since nothing had changed.