Best order of operations for SSD swap/Windows 10 to 11/Other stuff?

CrowTheRobot · May 10

I'll try to keep this as short as I can...

Most visible recently I've run into issues where my PC will apparently crash overnight and reboot, and suddenly my NVME boot drive won't be seen anymore as a boot device until I hard power off and boot again. Event Viewer doesn't offer much info and there's no BSOD logs. I'm hoping it's not a mobo issue, so I decided to start by taking the opportunity to upsize/replace my boot drive.

At the same time, I've discovered that this drive years back was set up as MBR instead of GPT, and the install of Windows 10 is almost 4 years old and probably still has junk data from multiple hardware changes since this "Ship of Theseus" was originally built in early COVID lockdown. My ultimate intention, since I mainly use the system for gaming and therefore can image it with little serious impact, is to do a fresh install of Windows, but I've been considering biting the bullet and moving to 11 now since I've found pages from Microsoft that still seem to indicate the upgrade is free.

To move to 11, I was able to turn on fTPM and still need to enable Secure Boot, but I've heard horror stories of people enabling it and not being able to boot Windows at all without a start-from-scratch-entirely wipe and install.

So basically, how best can/should I accomplish the following:

1. Swap a boot drive

2. Make sure the new drive is GPT

3. Make sure Secure Boot is on

4. Get Windows 11 on here without having to pay for a new key

Or, is it possible to use my current Windows 10 key to do a fresh install of 11 from the start? That would probably be the easiest path, but I'm not sure if you can do that like you used to be able to use older keys to activate 10.

Electronics Wizardy · May 10

I'd do the clone to the new drive first. That will tell you if the new ssd fixies your issues or if its something else.

Then make a backup before touching other stuff.

Then I'd do the mbr2gpt tool and hope it suceeds. Then turn on secureboot and other win 11 requirements to see if will do the upgrde. I'd bckup between these steps.

Thomas4 · May 10

If there's nothing on the drive you want to keep, just install Windows 11 on it. Safe Boot, was a now-failed attempt to stop Windows users from installing Linux in a dual boot situation, and no longer provides any use whatsoever. Even when I was running Win 10 alone, I never had any problems when I turned Safe Boot off.

CrowTheRobot · May 13

On 5/10/2024 at 6:49 PM, Thomas4 said:

If there's nothing on the drive you want to keep, just install Windows 11 on it. Safe Boot, was a now-failed attempt to stop Windows users from installing Linux in a dual boot situation, and no longer provides any use whatsoever. Even when I was running Win 10 alone, I never had any problems when I turned Safe Boot off.

...But Windows 11 needs Secure Boot to even install. It won't let you start without it.

I ended up installing 11 for now on my original drive, after a saga with my new NVMe (because of course I bought a WD Black SN850X, which is one of a dozen specific NVMe models that DON'T work with my motherboard due to some sort of pin mismatch), and having to jockey Secure Boot on at the same time as Compatibility Mode so my original drive would be seen in the first place