My PC is a mess. It has 3 hard drives. A 256GB SSD with Windows 10 on it, a 500GB hard drive, and a 1TB NVMe drive. It's young enough that the CPU is Windows 11 compatible but it doesn't have TMP 2.0 turned on or Secure Boot. The other problem is that the 256GB main drive is just too small. When I sat down to get this thing ready, it had about 47MB of free space. Ouch!
So, my priorities were as follows:
- Move the Windows drive (c:\) to the 1TB drive. There it won't run out of space (I hope!) and I won't have to balance where I install programs.
- Enable Secure Boot.
- Enable TPM 2.0
Once I complete that, I'll be ready and able to upgrade to Windows 11.
I thought the first part would be easy. My SSD is from Crucial which has a free version of Acronis. This will let me copy the whole drive from my current 256GB SSD to my 1TB drive. I've used it before and it's an excellent program both in that it's simple and that it works. Easy right? Wrong!
I downloaded Acronis and, following the instructions, copied the main drive partitions to the 1TB drive. This was simple and straightforward although be warned, it will delete everything on the target drive so don't have anything there that you need to keep. Unfortunately, this is when my problems began.
I shut down the PC and disconnected the 256GB drive. This way it will definitely boot to the 1TB drive. Then I went into the BIOS and, after a bit of trial and error, I set the boot disk to the 1TB drive. I rebooted and viola! It errored off saying that I couldn't boot from that disk. Ugh!
This set off hours of research as to why. I tried different configurations and a lot of different settings but in the end, I had to plug the 256GB drive back in and it would boot from there. What am I missing?!
At this point, I decided to do a clean install. Maybe that will help. I went into Windows and started up settings -> updates -> recover. Then I chose to reset the PC and not save any programs. At the very least it should free up some space so maybe I'll be able to run Windows 11 on the small drive.
That worked and so I had a new install of Windows 10 that only took half of the small SSD. I guess I'll have to live with that. Now to enable secure boot.
This is when I found out that my PC is not using a secure boot compatible startup program. It's using MBR when it should be using GPT. No problem. I can run mbr2gpt.exe from an admin PowerShell prompt and upgrade. So, I ran:
C:\Windows\System32> mbr2gpt /convert /drive:disk0 /allowFullOS
That should work but it failed with a really vague error message. Argh!
At this point I go back to the BIOS. Why can't I boot from the 1TB drive? I play with a lot of settings but I'm not making any progress. Then I notice that the BIOS is a version from 2020. Wow, that old! So I go to Asus' web site (it's an Asus motherboard) and figure out how to download the latest BIOS update - from December 2024 - nice! I install the BIOS and boot up and, what do you know, TPM 2.0 is enabled! Well, steps 1 and 2 are still not working but step 3 is now good to go.
OK, you know what, I'm going to try to put the OS onto the 500GB drive. It's not an SSD so it will be a lot slower but maybe it will work. I download Acronis again (because I lost it when I did the clean install) and try to copy the C:\ drive to the 500GB hard drive. That failed (I don't know why) and left the 500GB drive an empty partition.
I'm spinning around here but decided to try mbr2gpt again. This time I find that I can create a log file. I run it and it fails but the log tells me that my disk doesn't have a boot loader. Oh no! My guess is that the boot loader was on the 500GB drive for some reason and that's why I couldn't convert it. However, I've dropped all of the partitions from that drive so now I'm pretty sure that the PC won't boot any more. This is not going well!
Then it hits me. I need to do a clean install with a GPT boot loader. If I do that, I may even be able to boot from the 1TB drive. I've been worried because I don't know if my Windows key will work any more. It's a Windows 8 key and they're not supported any more. However, I found that I have the activation loaded digitally which means it's connected to my Microsoft account and not to an activation key. So it should work.
Well, I cross my fingers and give it a go. First I boot into the BIOS and disable CSM. That is what forces secure boot so if that works I'll be killing 2 birds with one stone. Then I boot to the USB drive with Windows 10 on it. I use the advanced install options and I'm able to choose the 1TB drive as the install target after I drop the partitions on the other drives (I don't know why I had to do that but it wouldn't work until I did). I installed Windows 10 on the 1TB drive reboot and... bam! It all works!
So, now I have a fresh Windows 10 install and it passes the Windows 11 checks. All I need now is for Windows update to offer Windows 11.
UPDATE: About 24 hours after installing Windows 10, Windows Update let me know that I could download and upgrade to Windows 11. I upgraded and am now running Windows 11 on my PC. Woohoo!
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