Updates to Windows 10 ceased late last year and I’ve been planning to upgrade to Windows 11 for a while. I mainly use Ubuntu on my machines but I like to keep my Windows skills up to date. Upgrading my virtual copy of Windows 10 on Proxmox was quite easy, but the Bitlocker install of Windows 10 on my laptop failed to upgrade and then subsequently wouldn’t boot up either. I was worried about losing my activation key to Windows as there isn’t a sticker on my laptop as there used to be, but because I hadn’t linked the Windows install to a Microsoft account my Bitlocker key wasn’t saved and I had no choice but to install it again.
Windows 11 install kept failing at 77% despite Secure Boot and UEFI being enabled. I decided to try and install Windows 10 again but this also failed. Searching Google brought up a Reddit post which said that Windows installations couldn’t cope with another hard drive being present as when doing its many reboots it wouldn’t be able to tell which hard disk to boot from! It recommended disabling the SATA interface in the BIOS. I wanted to install it to the SATA drive, so disabled the NVMe interface instead. This time Windows 11 installed without hiccup despite taking 3 hours to install and do the updates, this compares with about 20 minutes for an Ubuntu install (including updates) on the same hardware. Why it needs to reboot several times is a mystery particularly when Ubuntu doesn’t need to reboot at all apart from into the newly installed system at the end of its installation.
I used a usb stick on which I’d installed an open source loader called Ventoy. It had its own UEFI key which needed to be installed into the BIOS where I discovered that the Windows license key was installed. Ventoy seems to have binary blobs in its source code tree on github but everyone seems to be using it, and it works very well.
Windows installed a new copy of the EFI partition so I had to copy its contents onto my original EFI partition on the NVMe drive and on rebooting it, loaded the normal Grub menu again. Unfortunately my wifi was no longer working in Ubuntu and another Google search revealed that the Windows 11 quick boot enabled the suspension of the wifi which is why Ubuntu no longer detected it. Disabling the quick boot in the power settings of the control panel in Windows 11 fixed it.
Another Google search revealed that the local account settings have been well hidden and Microsoft wants you to link it to an online login, but choosing to set it up for a college or workplace and choosing to add the install to a domain allows you to create a local account.