It seems that I am becoming experienced with migrating very old Windows 10 installations on older hardware to newer hardware and then upgrading them to Windows 11.
The whole process is time consuming. Sometimes it is fairly easy, sometimes there's a whole lot of things that need to be done.
The one I am working on now was originally on an HP Pavilion desktop PC with a 1st Gen Intel i3 processor.
Had to convert SATA mode from RAID to AHCI.
To get a CloneZilla clone of the system, I had to fix an MBR GPT mismatch by deleting the GPT info, as this Windows 10 install was Legacy boot, not yet UEFI.
sgdisk -z /dev/sda (where sda is the drive to remove the GPT info from)
Did a full backup using Samsung Data Migration to a Samsung SATA SSD before that, just in case that operation caused data loss or a problem.
Then resized and moved partitions using gparted.
I planned on restoring the CloneZilla image to an nvme drive, not a SATA drive (as it was originally). So in order for Windows to be prepared for that, and not get an "inaccessible device" error, I ran this command in Windows right before making an image:
sc.exe config stornvme start= boot
Then got a CloneZilla image. Cloned it to another machine that could do both legacy and uefi boot (the original machine could only do legacy).
After all that, the commands to convert from legacy to uefi boot didn't work because there was no recovery partition. I had to copy the winre.wim file from another Windows installation (got it from another customer computer that I have currently with Windows 10).
Had to put that winre.wim file in C:\Windows\System32\Recovery - then run "reagentc /enable" to enable the recover environment.
Then this command worked:
mbr2gpt /convert /allowFullOS
It would not before enabling the recovery environment.
Next step is rebooting the machine in UEFI mode and making sure the Windows 10 installation has, in fact, been converted from mbr to gpt.
When that is done, I can run the upgrade process from Windows 10 to Windows 11 using an installer created by the rufus disk creator utility that bypasses the hardware checks Windows 11 normally has.
After a successful upgrade, I can finally move it to the newer computer that the customer purchased from me.
#Windows #Windows10 #Windows11 #CloneZilla #TechNotes