I’m probably moving to W11, though previous secure boot problems have been an issue
I’m probably moving to W11, though previous secure boot problems have been an issue
Okay hi, so all chances are that anywhere between now and a year from now I'll be upgrading to W11. My PC meets the requirements. Now there's a problem. I have tried to upgrade to W11 in the past and thought it was a great success... until I tried running a game (I think it was FIFA 23 at the time, but from what I could gather many games require this), the game would give me an error telling me I need to have secure boot enabled (and something else I can't remember). I am by no means a tech savant but I know my way around a little bit so after doing some research it didn't look that hard. Hop into the BIOS, enable secure boot and I believe one more setting that is only available once you have secure boot enabled and done, right? After trying and failing a couple of times finally secure boot get's enabled so I thought okay; we can play the game now... I boot up my computer and no output on my monitor. I just bought this computer so I was terrified I bricked something, but after trying a couple of times all I had to do was take out the graphics card, connect my monitor to my motherboard and it booted into bios and I quickly reverted the changes. Connected my GPU and it worked fine. Obviously first thing I did was roll back to W10 as I had upgraded it from W11 and it was easy to go back (go Microsoft!) That's where I left it at, I had spent the entire day troubleshooting and was done with W11. I work so I wasn't really ready to spend my weekend trying to figure that out. So, terrible experience on my first try trying to upgrade to W11, but at some point I'm going to have to give in on a new OS. Whether it's W11 or W12, knowing Microsoft this issue will persist. So at some point I'm going to have to "upgrade", soon I'll be buying a 2tb m.2 and I might give it another try to "upgrade" after I put that ssd in, preferably I don't wipe any of my current drives but if that's the only way that is how it is. My question is, how do I avoid the terrible experience I've had and what did I do wrong? I have read online it could have to do with partition styles so I'll be posting as much information of my PC I know, and I hope I could get an explanation of how happened what happened, and more importantly step-by-step on how to avoid it if I do decide to upgrade back to W11. I've also read stories that it has to do with drivers that are installed. I am not sure whether I had DP or HDMI connected at the time. Currently my monitor(s) are connected through DP. Like I said, I am by no means a tech savant, and even less so a software savant so I lack the ability to understand the problem. All I am good at is google solutions, but I am yet to find a concrete answer to this. Hardware: B550M Aorus Elite 2x8gb RAM AMD Ryzen 5 5600G NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 12gb VRAM Drives: 1x SSD 240gb (W10 installed); partition style: GPT 1x HDD 1tb; partition style: GPT 1x M.2 480gb; partition style: MBR
Seeing as you've already upgraded before you may be able to simply do a clean install of W11 with secure boot already enabled, just choose you have no code during install, making sure to install the right version (likely Home edition) and once you login to your Microsoft account it should find the existing license from your prior upgrade. I'd imagine this less likely to run into issues. Personally as I recall I enabled fTPM and Secure Boot BEFORE starting the upgrade and ran into no issues.
There could be several reasons why the system didn't boot into Windows with Secure Boot. - To avoid issues, ensure the first startup was in Safe Mode, which helps prevent Blue Screens or black screens caused by driver problems. - When enabling Secure Boot, the boot device might disappear from the BIOS view, and another drive could be selected as the start point, potentially blocking OS loading. - The hardware may use an older BIOS version that conflicts with Secure Boot, UEFI, and fTPM during Windows 11 installation. Make sure you're using the most recent BIOS release. - For Secure Boot configuration, the operating system drive should be GPT instead of MBR.
It should be fTPM activated first, then secure boot can be enabled. The GPU comes pre-assembled. The black screen issue relates to GPU secure boot compatibility, not Windows involvement.
I believe that was the final step, yes. Actually, it's different with the SSD that has W10. I'll remember this if I try again. Thanks. Shouldn't it still boot into BIOS or at least something? In my situation there was no display at all. Of course, I should verify further. This seems to match what I read online. Does it matter whether any other drivers use MBR? Since my second SSD is MBR, perhaps it's related to my graphics card. I'm nearly certain I upgraded the graphics card when I had the 3060 installed, though I used a GeForce GTX 1650 before that.