What? I installed Windows 11 today? and no UEFI or TPM required! also Adata sucks

[oshunluvr]

TL/DR: I have 2 Adata nvme drives I've been trying fruitlessly to update firmware for over a year. The Adata updater is a windows program (of course). I won't ever buy another Adata product and nor should you. On the other hand Samsung provides a bootable ISO that worked flawlessly - and I even was able to boot the ISO directly from grub. It's a Linux based ISO, so easy as cake.

Full version of events - or skip to the bottom for the punchline:

I had been trying for months to get the Adata firmware "Toolbox" updater to run under Wine or from a VM with a drive pass-through. The firmware updater would not recognize the drives. It simply reported "Not an Adata Product" when selected by the updater (when I managed to get it running that is...) or didn't see the drives at all.

I tried installing Windows to USB drives several different ways but only had success booting once and it wouldn't run the updater anyway.

I don't use UEFI and have Secure Boot off and I don't really even know what TPM 2.0 is except that I couldn't get it to work with libvert and supposedly Windows 11 requires this. A couple days ago I found the solution to getting Windows 11 to boot without TPM and Secure boot so I was able to install it to a libvert VM. I was hopeful that would be my solution. The newest Adata Toolbox program launched and could see the drives, but still reported them as "Not Adata Products."

Then it occurred to me yesterday that if I could install in a libvert VM without UEFI/TPM, why not to bare metal? And so my day began...

I have 2x 1TB drives not being used at the moment so I had a place to install to. About an hour of web research and one Youtube video later, I had a bootable Windows Recovery partition! The steps to this were simple:

1. Created a NTFS partition (8GB is enough if you're going to attempt this)
2. Mount the Win11 ISO (UDF format) and copy all the files from it to the NTFS partition
3. Enable OS_Prober in GRUB and run update-grub
4. Reboot

Rebooting into Win11 Recovery brought up the installer. To avoid UEFI and TPM checks, the first thing you do before installation is add a couple registry entries to bypass the checks. These steps are what allowed me to make the VM installation work also:

1. Press Shift-F10 to open a command line window
2. Run "regedit"
3. Add a Key to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM called "LabConfig"
4. Create 2 DWORD (32-bit) values of "BypassTPMCheck" and "BypassSecureBootCheck"
5. Set them both at a value of 1 (meaning "True")
6. Continue the installation

Well, once I had the install started, I had to leave my office for a few minutes, grabbed a cup of coffee, etc. When I came back, the system had rebooted. The selected partition for installation did indeed have NTFS and some files on it that looked like Windows, so I ran update-grub again but this time the new partition (or what was on it) wasn't detected as bootable. I decided to re-run the install and sit through it so I could see what happened. Unexpectedly, this time it booted to a selection menu to either "repair" or boot to Windows! I selected "Windows 11" and lo and behold Windows Setup began!

Several times during the setup steps, the system rebooted. I have no idea if it was just this hacky installation or if it's a normal part of the setup. It didn't do that when I made the VM, but you never know with Winblows what's going to happen.

When I got to the part about signing in to my Microsoft account (I don't have one, LOL) and there didn't seem to be a way to skip this step. I needed yet another work around. Turns out if you disable the internet before this step it doesn't appear. So Shift-F10 again, then this command:

ipconfig /release

and the darn thing rebooted itself again. When I got it back up, the internet connection did not restore and the setup continued past the MS account sign in as I desired. I had to restore the internet after this, so it's another simple command:

ipconfig /renew

and I was off to the races! After setup was done, it no longer rebooted itself like it had been and it self-adjusted for my dual monitor setup without my input.

I downloaded the Adata Toolbox and installed it and...

...it ran!
...it detected the drives!
...it notified me that new firmware was available!
...it downloaded the firmware and installer!

PUNCHLINE: The firmware installer did not detect the drives.

Since I have plenty of drive space, I'm leaving Win11 there. It seems stable enough now and who knows if I'll need it again. I never did get the installation to boot directly, but the Recovery partition still boots and launches Windows 11 by itself. I did shrink the two partitions to their minimum sizes: 8GB for Recovery and 60GB for Windows. Maybe next update to Adata's software will work, but I'm not holding my breath - just a little drive space. Sigh....

[TWPonKubuntu]

I'm sorry for your pain, but I also thank you for showing me why I use Linux ONLY. Also I'll take your advice on avoiding Adata drives... Fortunately, I work for myself and no longer need to spend time/money convincing clients to stay away from the Microsoft world. Monty Python said it best: "Run Away, Run Away"...

[claydoh]

Yeah, TPM version can be important , and can actually be useful on Linux for crypto/drive encryption stuff, so this chip isn't an automatic negative, other than limiting support for Win 11 on older systems, without some workarounds.
On my thin client, I have Windows there because most work from home stuff seems to involve Windows specific software, even if it is run on a remote Windows instance - Unless it is using something like a non-web based AWS or similar setup, you *have* to use a simplified and Windows-only application to log in and run it. But, to be honest, having been in a few training groups filled with regular people who can barely find the start menu and have zero comprehension of multiple tabs and windows, the simpler stuff is.....understandable. Adding in a remote desktop to the mix was painful to watch.

But, back on topic, Windows may come with Secure Boot enabled on preinstall systems, but I have never had to use it when installing Windows (other than testing to see what dual booting involved), and I have also always disabled it with no ill effect on the very few systems I have had that I didn't immediately wipe Windows from.

On my thin client, I did decide update the firmware for the TPM chip to version 2.0 (HP provided this), and used whatever workaround was available at the time to upgrade to Windows 11 on the unsupported 6th gen Intel i7, just to see if it would work.
It did, and actually seemed to handle the remote desktop and video conferencing software (adobe ) a bit easier.

[oshunluvr]

Reportedly, this work-around I did disables updates from MS, but - and OF COURSE - on my first reboot I was greeted with the lovely "Do not power off your computer - Updates being installed" or whatever nonsense they put in that message.

[claydoh]

Workarounds for this sort of thing change/break on Windows about as often as kernel updates in ubuntu lol!

I think my workaround to upgrade to Win 11 on unsupported CPUs is broken now.

setup.exe /product server, and that was only a few months ago.