Windows 11 startup problems following an upgrade from Windows 10
Windows 11 startup problems following an upgrade from Windows 10
Hi there! Today I changed my Windows 10 setup to Windows 11 since support for Windows 10 is ending. My CPU is an i7 6700K, which isn’t recognized, and I don’t have a TPM installed. I used Rufus to create an ISO for Windows 11 23H2 (German version) on a USB drive, removing the need for a TPM, an online Microsoft account, and disabling automatic Bitlocker encryption. The original ISO was downloaded from Microsoft earlier. After that, I simply ran setup.exe on the USB stick. The upgrade succeeded in most cases, but now my Windows installation isn’t showing up in UEFI settings. I can’t select it as the default boot option. When I open the boot menu, it appears as scrambled text. If I choose it, it boots fine, though I have to do this repeatedly. All updates were installed, yet my boot loader only displays the mouse area and doesn’t render properly. Pressing the down key followed by Enter works, but I’m frustrated because I don’t want to keep relying on the boot menu. I’m wondering if this issue is related to the “not supported” status of my system. Maybe trying bootrec to reconfigure the bootloader would help, though I’m worried it could cause more problems. Anyone have experience with this situation and any suggestions?
I attempted to regenerate the installer and then reinstall it again. It seems something went wrong, possibly corrupting the system, and since this was a recent update, it might be better to start fresh now instead of uncovering more issues later. By the way, when I upgraded from Windows 8.1 to 10, I only discovered months later that I was still using a Windows 8.1 kernel behind a Windows 10 interface, and my NVIDIA drivers kept failing.
Thanks for your reply! I wasn’t expecting that response, but maybe restoring my Windows 10 install and upgrading to Windows 11 from there could work. It sounds like a big challenge I wasn’t prepared for. I’ll keep an eye out for any advice on avoiding similar issues.
don't upgrade, just install Windows 11. It's funny since my search still worked like it did in Win8—early Win10 users were complaining, but I didn't have any problems. The next clue was that DISM wasn't functioning and it showed the version you're running, which turned out to be Windows 8.1. From what I've learned, this was a rare case because most machines with partial upgrades ended up completely broken. Both 8.1→10 and 10→11 were total disasters for me.
Thanks to all the contributors! It seems the news about needing a total reset feels even worse since setting everything up again will be really challenging. Maybe swapping to a new SSD would make things easier and let me install Windows 11 without hassle. Ideally, I wouldn’t have tried to upgrade my old Windows 10 beforehand. At least I avoided doing the image restore and second round of upgrades until I realized I needed a fresh start.
Something puzzled me though: with an unsupported OS, could I really just reinstall using a standard media without Microsoft interfering? Or was that only possible in the past when upgrading existing Windows 10? But if I’m understanding correctly, upgrading should be avoided altogether because issues would arise. Yet, for supported systems, it seems risky to proceed.
I’m curious why a TPM might prevent a corrupted but functional bootloader from appearing. In any case, I’ll likely start the fresh installation soon, though it’s frustrating because I’ll have to adapt everything to fit the new setup. Still, I can’t help feeling frustrated by Microsoft’s decision to discontinue Windows 10 support while many users struggle to upgrade to Windows 11.
No new version requires bypassing; upgrades aren't really available. This has been consistent since Windows 11 was released.
I upgraded to Windows 11 using the 6th generation version without a complete OS reinstall, which required secure boot and TPM 2.0. A toggle was used to acknowledge CPU incompatibility before it succeeded. A fresh installation also functions properly when secure boot and TPM are enabled, but without them it didn’t work.