• Hi all and welcome to TheWoodHaven2 brought into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming! We all have Alasdair to thank for the vast bulk of the heavy lifting to get us here, no more so than me because he's taken away a huge burden of responsibility from my shoulders and brought us to this new shiny home, with all your previous content (hopefully) still intact! Please peruse and feed back. There is still plenty to do, like changing the colour scheme, adding the banner graphic, tweaking the odd setting here and there so I have added a new thread in the 'Technical Issues, Bugs and Feature Requests' forum for you to add any issues you find, any missing settings or just anything you'd like to see added/removed from the feature set that Xenforo offers. We will get to everything over the coming weeks so please be patient, but add anything at all to the thread I mention above and we promise to get to them over the next few days/weeks/months. In the meantime, please enjoy!

Win 11 upgrade from Win 10 Unsupported machine

Steve Maskery

Steve Maskery

Old Oak
Joined
Jul 27, 2014
Messages
2,374
Reaction score
1,329
Location
87290 Laplagne, France
Has anyone here successfully upgraded a non-compliant Windows 10 machine to Win 11? There appear to be several loophole workarounds, which Microsoft are trying to close, one by one.
I've downloaded the lated patch from Rufus, released 2 days ago:
github.com

Release Rufus 4.6 BETA · pbatard/rufus

Add a new setup.exe wrapper to bypass Windows 11 24H2 in-place upgrade restrictions (#2568) Add TimeZone to regional options replication (#2499) Set local account passwords to not expire by default...
github.com github.com

Despite once being an IT guy (I can tell you everything you could want to know about Window 98...), I'm at a loss to know what to do next.
Do I simply run the .EXE file? Do I have to load it onto a flash drive and boot from it?

If anyone has any experience of this, or can point me in the direction of a tutorial, I shall be very grateful.
S
 
I've not attempted this particular operation, but have used Rufus in the past. Some of the details might be off here as I'm working from relatively old memories, but the general outline should be about right.

First thing you'll need (apart from Rufus itself) is a USB stick that's big enough to hold the Windows installer. 8GB should be enough, according to Microsoft's download page.

Open Rufus, and plug in your USB stick. The top control in the application is a drop-down to select the target drive; make sure this is the USB stick you want to use, as everything on it will be deleted in the process.

It'll also ask you to select an ISO image file, or there's a 'DOWNLOAD' button to the right, where you can select the Windows version and build that you want, and it'll download the installer image for you.

Once you've got your target drive and source image selected, you can probably go straight to clicking 'START'. It'll understand that you're trying to make a Windows 11 installer, and give you some options to customise it. The one to 'Remove requirement for 4GB+ RAM, Secure Boot and TPM 2.0' is the one you need; the next two might or might not be of interest to you as well.

Once you're through that dialogue it'll start writing the installer files to your USB stick. Once it's done, reboot the computer and use that USB stick as the boot device, and you'll be in a Windows 11 installer that's been modified to skip those particular system checks.
 
Well I finally bit the bullet.
Downloading the ISO hung my machine, but a quick google as to why provided a fix. I used the Rufus utility and the fields were blank, I couldn't enter anything. So more googling and another fix. You have to insert your flash drive AFTER starting the software, it doesn't see it if it is already inserted. And so it went on, little problem after little problem. All of them well documented and fixable.
Then the actual installation. At one point it was stuck on 61% for absolutely ages and I thought it had hung. But I went to bed and when I woke (at 3.30, unfortunately, the norm these days) it wsa cooking again.
The upshot is that my unsupported machine is happily running Windows 11, without, as far as I am aware, any negative side effects.
In a previous life I was a computer support engineer and I remember only too well what disasters can happen when a new version of the software is released (I was once sent to Hyderabad in India with the wrong executable, pre-internet days, so we had to courrier out a cassette tape at great expense, but that's another story), so I was a bit apprehensive, TBH, but in the end it all went quite smoothly.

Thank you for your encouragement, Stephen. (y)
 
  • Like
Reactions: spb
Steve, when you say your W10 pc was "non Compliant" do you mean that the standard win11 checker said it would not support W11 or something else rendering it non compliant?

Do you feel w11 is a significant improvement when using or just different? I tend to be a bit of a luddite and only upgrade when software I want to use will not longer run under the current version of windaz. I still have a laptop running win 98 as some data logging software i regularly use will not run on newer windows machines.

Cheers
Bob
 
9fingers said:
Steve, when you say your W10 pc was "non Compliant" do you mean that the standard win11 checker said it would not support W11 or something else rendering it non compliant?
Click to expand...
The check that my instructions bypassed was that the machine has at least 4GB of RAM, supports Secure Boot, and has a TPM 2.0 module installed and active. Secure Boot and TPM generally have to be designed into the system when it's first built and can't be added later, which is why this requirement is such a pain if your computer doesn't meet it.

TPM 2.0 has been available since 2015, but until the announcement that Windows 11 would require it there was little benefit over the older TPM 1.2 specification, so a lot of lower to mid range systems were still sold with the older version. I'd guess this is where Steve's machine ran into trouble, if it's more than a couple of years old.
 
I've not used it long enough to notice very much difference, yet, Bob. One or two features, such as File Explorer, look slightly different, but my Desktop remained unchanged.
I wanted to do it only because of the security issues when W10 becomes unsupported next year. Up until now there have been several loopholes which have enabled people to circumvent the restrictions (such as the TPM stuff) but Microsoft are closing them one by one, so I thought I'd better get it done whilst it was still possible.
I don't want to spend money on a new machine when this one is stable and does exactly what I need. All my software - video editing, Sketchup 2017, OpenOffice - is of the same generation as the machine and works perfectly well. If it ain't broke, and all that.
But I don't like the idea of having a machine that is connected to the outside world that can be attacked. I get enough junk arriving as it is I'm now getting French guys ringing me up trying to part me from my Euros).
Be careful out there.
 
FWIW I’m about to replace a late 2009 iMac with a new Mac Mini. I’m taking the pessimists approach and expecting problems. I have never had the luxury of using the built in Migration Assistant as previous machines have been built from backup drives after catastrophic failures. 🤞
 
AndyP said:
FWIW I’m about to replace a late 2009 iMac with a new Mac Mini. I’m taking the pessimists approach and expecting problems. I have never had the luxury of using the built in Migration Assistant as previous machines have been built from backup drives after catastrophic failures. 🤞
Click to expand...
I can't quite remember what I had to do, but when I upgraded my Mini from HDD to SSD, I wen't through a painless process to move the stuff over. But for the life of me, I can't remember where I got the instructions.
 
I will have the luxury of a full back up, and a live iMac as I build the Mini. Migration Assistant looks easy enough to follow.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top