Hey everyone! I'm a first-time poster and I'm trying to upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11 since support for 10 is ending soon. I've hit a few roadblocks, so I could really use some help.
Here are my specs:
- **Motherboard:** MSI Pro B550M-P GEN3
- **Drives:** Primary Drive: 240GB WD Green 2.5" SSD, Secondary: Fanxiang S770 2TB NVME
- **Graphics Card:** NVidia GeForce RTX 4070
- **CPU:** AMD Ryzen 7 5800x 8 Core Processor
- **Power Supply:** Corsair CX750 80 Plus Non Modular
- **RAM:** 2x Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 32GB
Earlier this year, I replaced my power supply, graphics card, and CPU. Before that, my PC was running in UEFI mode and could manage secure boot. After the upgrades, though, I had to switch back to Legacy mode because my PC would just loop in the BIOS.
When I run the PC health check for Windows 11, it says the only reason I can't upgrade is that secure boot is disabled, which I can't enable because I'm stuck in Legacy mode. I suspect the issue might be the drives running in MBR instead of GPT, but I can't switch them manually in disk management. A friend suggested creating a USB with the Windows 11 installation media, but my PC just boots normally from it without any changes.
I also tried using CMD with the MBR2GPT command: "mbr2gpt /validate /allowfullos," but it keeps failing at the same point, stating it can't find space for the EFI partition. I'm really stuck and would appreciate any advice to help me out!
2 Answers
I recommend double-checking your BIOS settings to ensure UEFI is enabled. After that, when you create the Windows 11 installation media on the USB, use the tool from Microsoft to create it correctly. Make sure to select the option for UEFI when formatting the USB, too. This might help get it booting properly from the USB drive.
First things first, you need to check your boot priority in the BIOS/UEFI settings. Make sure that your USB drive is set as the first boot device. Once that’s sorted, you can try doing a clean installation of Windows 11 by deleting all existing partitions and creating new ones. This should allow the installer to set everything up correctly, including the EFI system partition needed for booting.
Could you give me a step-by-step on changing the boot priority? I know how to do it, but I'm not sure what it should be set to.