Prepping my PC for Windows 11 upgrade

Dreams65 said:

The steps I had to take to prep my PC for a Windows 11 upgrade (not a clean install).

1. Check to see if hardware is Windows 11 compatible.
2. Check in System Information for the BIOS Mode. If it is Legacy, then it has to be changed to UEFI in BIOS. Can only be done if the boot drive is GPT (GUID partition table) formatted, follow procedure to convert the partition below. Using this method to convert from MBR to GPT will not format or harm your partition, but as always, you should backup your drive before attempting anything like this.
3. Check boot drive's partition for boot layout. Go to Device Manager > Disk Drives > right mouse click on drive and select Properties > click Volumes tab > click Populate. If the boot layout is MBR (master boot record), then the drive has to be converted tp GPT.
4. TPM (trusted platform module) activation in bios either per hardware or software emulation (for my board I enabled fTPM in BIOS).
5. Covert MBR to GPT using Windows mbr2gpt tool.

Before converting MBR to GPT:

Check the amount of partitions on the boot drive, cannot be more than 3. If there are more than three, either a partition is user created or there are multiple recovery partitions. Delete a partition (make sure that all data is backed up on that partition before deletion). If the partition you want to delete is a recovery partition, then follow the procedure below to delete it.

BE VERY CAREFUL WHICH PARTITION YOU CHOOSE!

• Open CMD with admin rights
• Type diskpart
• Type list disk
• Type select disk (and then the number of the disk)
• Type list partition
• Type select partition (and then the number of the partition)
• Type delete partition override

After deleting the partition(s): go to Disk Management, right click on the boot partition, click on Extend Volume, choose the Unallocated partition(s) to absorb.

Convert MBR to GPT:

• Open CMD with admin rights
• Type mbr2gpt.exe /convert
• If an error occurs that states "can only be used from the Windows preinstallation environment", then type mbr2gpt.exe /convert /allowfullos

6. Disable CSM in BIOS
7. Enable UEFI Only in BIOS
8. Reboot PC…after reboot PC is ready to install Windows 11

This is various info I found on the net and used to prep my PC for Windows 11. Maybe this will help someone here having problems upgrading.

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Dreams65 said:

It looks difficult, but it actually isn't that hard. Just make sure you choose the right partitions and back up the ones you are deleting. What a lot of users are going to encounter is their PCs booting into BIOS, instead of Windows, after they have enabled UEFI and disabled CSM. This is because the boot partition is still MBR formatted and needs to be converted to GPT.

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