Info excruciating process of upgrading to Win11

[gorobei]

minor rant

to avoid having to jump through the hoops to get around ms blocking install of win11 without a ms account, i waited until the last day and finally updated my older pc but i wouldnt wish the experience on anyone but a worse enemy.

i got lucky in that my hardware met the requirements but i "just needed to turn it on". (best analogy: jumping hurdles to land and step on rakes)



in case anyone needs a overall view on the process of upgrading a w10 installation to w11:

requirements say tmp2.0 motherboard and secureboot enabled (ignoring cpu/gpu/ram specs) but they dont tell you that you need your install drive to be a GUID Partition Table bootable to enable secureboot. (who the hell was using GPT 10 years ago when the only info was older os would have trouble reading a gpt drive)

• so to start you need to back up your system image (win7 backup is still included in w10 and still works)
• run mbr2gpt (included in w10) in commandline (there are flags for verify to test if it will work)
• if it says converted successfully then you can restart and start messing with bios.

in bios:

• you will have to look up where it is for your m/b bios
• turn on boot gpt or some motherboards have it as disable legacy. save and boot into desktop to make sure it works. drive management will show gpt status in properties/volumes
• turn on secureboot in bios, you may need to then go to key management and click assign keys.

boot windows

• if you are like me the damn thing will say i still dont qualify for w11. but that is a damn dirty lie, you need to force the windows compatibility appraiser to run to see that tpm and secureboot are on now. i did it through TaskScheduler: force it to run and refresh until it says ready.
• you can now go to winUpdates and the option for w11 should be there.

the install took 8 to 10 hours over 2 days as it seemed to stall out so i paused it and just used w10 for the time being. after i resumed the download it finished and i upgraded to w11 in a few minutes.

after that it is the debloat and disable spying/telemetry tango.
bitlocker sounds fine for portable devices, but you dont own/control the keys as they are held/stored by ms so that is a hard no from me.
some of the more extreme paranoid yt guides also say that win11 has repeatedly killed dualboot linux partitions with each major build update.

i'm sure there was the smarter way to do this with rufus but i just wanted the damn thing to work. for my next pc build i will likely go to steam os or bazzite or whatever linux proton compatibility layer lets me never touch a ms product again. i dont want a ms account and will never get one.

[sidenote: i also downloaded the last released w10 iso just in case. supposedly ms stops offering it after the end of support. if you have a w10 system that you need to maintain on legacy support you may want to get the iso.]

 

[LV3]

I started using Linux Mint as a daily driver a couple years ago. I won't say it has always been easy, but it also hasn't been unreasonably difficult to figure out. For games, Valve and Steam have done amazing things for us. For much of everything else, I've gotten a lot of programs that don't work natively on Linux to work using Wine. Not dealing with Microsoft has been nice

 

[WelshBloke]

Is secure boot mandatory now? I've always had it turned off on all my machines including the Win11 ones and none of them have had forced installs.

 

[gorobei]

secureboot was part of the req for the updater to offer the w11 upgrade. it was probably not required when they first offered the w11 upgrade path much like the registry hacks that let people without tpm install w11 early on. as they have figured out all the edge cases for the upgrade to fail, im sure ms is more comfortable requiring SB.

 

[C1]

Ya, I know it's MSN, :

How to install Windows 11 on almost any unsupported PC

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I never had to make the MBR-to-GPT conversion during the entirety of my Windows 10 experience. I believe I took care of it when transitioning twixt Win 7 and Win 10, while replacing an HDD boot with an SSD boot. Or maybe it happened at the time of my 2017 DIY-built system, but that was the time I swapped HDD to SSD one month, and SSD to NVME a couple months later. I understand with systems older than that it's an extra hurdle. But it needs to be seen in perspective.

No doubt the Win 10 to Win 11 upgrade has "extra complications". But for me the worst of it was the $25/PC purchase of little-bitty TPM 2.0 modules and their motherboard installations. And -- of course -- the registry-hack to ignore CPU ineligibility and the discovery that I needed to deactivate MalwareBytes to keep it from loading on startup so that Win 11 installation would succeed without rollback.

Maybe a person's tolerance for this derives in their "path-finding" efforts in the earlier days of "micro-computers" as we called them then. Noobs and millennials may not be so happy with it. Someone like me, who was "klooging" computer parts in the 1980s could just accept the troubles and the time spent.

Still, it's a lot of inconvenience and trouble -- I agree.

 

[manly]

Is secure boot mandatory now? I've always had it turned off on all my machines including the Win11 ones and none of them have had forced installs.

The last article I read said that it doesn't have to be enabled, but it has to be an option.

 

[BoomerD]

I'm in the update process now. Slow...almost as slow as AT gets when it's being scraped. I think I'm 30 minutes into the "working on updates" after downloading, haven't hit 30% yet. (it's been stuck on 29% for about 10 minutes)

My wife's PC is old...from maybe 2016. NOT W11 compatible. She rarely uses it since her stroke, so it's NOT worth spending the $$ to uprade it.

 

[WilliamM2]

Is secure boot mandatory now? I've always had it turned off on all my machines including the Win11 ones and none of them have had forced installs.

No, the motherboard only has to be capable of secure boot. You do not have to enable it.

It's all listed here:

Windows 11 Specs and System Requirements | Microsoft Windows

Find an overview of Windows 11 specs and features from Microsoft. Learn about the device specifications, versions, and languages available for Windows 11

www.microsoft.com

 

[BoomerD]

Another 20 minutes...still at 29%. HDD light continues to blink like it's working...
Like an idiot, I didn't back anything up before I started...Cross fingers I haven't hosed myself.

 

[BoomerD]

After another 25 minutes, the system rebooted, came back at 30%, jumped to 48%, rebooted, 64%, rebooted, came back at 75%...88%...91%...93%...95, 96, 97, 98, 100%...and it's done. I have a windows start screen! <phew>
Everything is still loading and updating, but it seems like I survived.

 

[BoomerD]

OK, other than a bit of anxiety due to the LOOOONG pauses, it went pretty well. As with any new OS, this is going to take a bit of getting used to, but it's not bad so far.

 

[lxskllr]

I REALLY hate that with MS installation of... just about anything. The long pauses. Did the computer hang? Is it installing anything? Who knows?! They're certainly not gonna say. You just wait and scratch your head. And everything takes forever. The installation of any windows software requires them to move all the bits on the drive 3 places right so there's room for the new program. You'll just have to wait til they finish re-queuing...

 

[BonzaiDuck]

OK, other than a bit of anxiety due to the LOOOONG pauses, it went pretty well. As with any new OS, this is going to take a bit of getting used to, but it's not bad so far.

I'm willing to bet you were already familiar with Classic Shell. Here's the link to its successor:

Open Shell

If I was "slow-to-adopt" at beginning of July, you aren't significantly late to the party. With the ESU on my daily driver, I'm beginning to lean toward upgrading it to Win 11, two successes already under my belt here.