One for the tech heads-Installing UEFI BIOS + disk MBR-GPT

[Whoozit]

My main PC is now vintage at 12 years old. However good base components and upgrades mean it works absolutely fine including for up to date gaming. And I'd prefer to spend £1500 on essential stuff like 911 servicing

The PC has Win10 installed with an EFI BIOS. With the forced move to Win11 next year, I need to work out the upgrade steps.

The mboard is a Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD3P-B3, with the F8 BIOS listed here. I've added a TPM module to the board, but it'll do nothing until it has a BIOS which can see it.

The key question is, if I upgrade the BIOS to a UEFI BIOS, do I also have to change the boot disk from MBR to GPT before the BIOS upgrade? Or do all UEFI BIOS allow legacy disk formats? Otherwise it seems a chicken and egg situation!

Thanks all.

Edited by Whoozit on Friday 10th May 10:21

[xeny]

In general, UEFI BIOS supports legacy boot. I have encountered a few earlier ones where this was idiosyncratic, so keep your fingers crossed.

[Whoozit]

xeny said:

In general, UEFI BIOS supports legacy boot. I have encountered a few earlier ones where this was idiosyncratic, so keep your fingers crossed.

Thanks. If I do find teh BIOS doesn't support legacy boot, is it possible to do the MBR->GPT change as a second drive in another Win10 computer?

[colin79666]

You need to replace the PC or at least the motherboard, RAM and CPU if you want it to be Windows 11 officially compatible. It has more requirements that just a TPM (v2 or on cpu by the way).

[xeny]

colin79666 said:

You need to replace the PC or at least the motherboard, RAM and CPU if you want it to be Windows 11 officially compatible. It has more requirements that just a TPM (v2 or on cpu by the way).

Certainly wondering about why you'd add a TPM given you'll need to override the CPU detection code anyway?

[Solocle]

Or just bypass the requirements in the Windows 11 setup - https://www.isumsoft.com/windows-11/install-window...

[w1bbles]

Agreed with the bypass option. I've just installed Windows 11 on a 6 year old incompatible Mac using Rufus

https://github.com/pbatard/rufus/releases

Worked no problems.

[xeny]

w1bbles said:

Agreed with the bypass option. I've just installed Windows 11 on a 6 year old incompatible Mac using Rufus

https://github.com/pbatard/rufus/releases

Worked no problems.

I've done this with one machine for testing purposes. It gets monthly patches fine, but it never seems to get the annual feature updates, so as they go EOL it stops getting patches until I manually install a feature update having bypassed the machine check in the installer.

Is this what other people experience?

[AlexC1981]

I used Rufus as well and can recommend it.

I've had Windows 11 installed for nearly two years on a 2011 first gen i3 Thinkpad and on a Dell dual Xeon workstation of similar vintage.

In the case of the Thinkpad, it runs better on Windows 11 than many different versions of Linux I tested on it.

[White-Noise]

I cant answer your question but something maybe quite handy for you which I discovered recently. You can install windows without a cd key, some features are limited but you can use it anyway. Might be handy for you just a thought if you wanted to try on a separate HD.

[AlexC1981]

xeny said:

I've done this with one machine for testing purposes. It gets monthly patches fine, but it never seems to get the annual feature updates, so as they go EOL it stops getting patches until I manually install a feature update having bypassed the machine check in the installer.

Is this what other people experience?

I think I might have the same problem, I'm only on 22H2, though I've had all the Co-pilot stuff install itself recently. How do you force the update?

[xeny]

AlexC1981 said:

I think I might have the same problem, I'm only on 22H2, though I've had all the Co-pilot stuff install itself recently. How do you force the update?

Download the Windows ISO, write it to USB with Rufus (which can do the edits to allow it to install on unsupported hardware) and then run the installer from the stick, but when normally running Windows (so it does an upgrade install rather than fresh install).

[AlexC1981]

I'll do that, thank you

[Whoozit]

colin79666 said:

You need to replace the PC or at least the motherboard, RAM and CPU if you want it to be Windows 11 officially compatible. It has more requirements that just a TPM (v2 or on cpu by the way).

Mmm. I'd missed the specific list of supported CPUs. How annoying. Health Check suggests it is the only blocker to a Win11 upgrade.

Guess I'll wait and see whether the lack of movement in the installed Win10 base forces their hand on continued support.

[xeny]

Whoozit said:

How annoying. Health Check suggests it is the only blocker to a Win11 upgrade.

This why a lot of peoplle will be unhappy. 11 Adds little discernible, and pushes a lot of decently performing hardware into e-waste.

The poorer businesses, universities and schools that historically ran "long" hardware refresh cycles will be livid if the extend 10 support. They've spent to them quite a lot of money to refresh perfectly functional hardware.