That honestly does make me feel a bit better putting off upgrading my desktop for one game. It's something I have to do sooner or later since apparently Windows 11 (and presumably 12 whenever that comes out) require GPT not to mention clean installs are never a bad thing just tedious as all hell, but I'd rather be doing that at my leisure than stopping everything I've got going on to essentially start over. None of this would be a damn problem if Windows just allowed GPU passthrough to a virtual machine. With every passing day Linux looks more and more appealing, and I already have a linux machine setup as a media center under my living room TV.
All my drives are MBR, and I never was forced to convert to the pointless GPT even using the latest W11 builds
Any specific version of Enterprise LTSC or steps needed to make that happen? I had no problem in 2020 going from LTSB (2016) to LTSC (2019) with an MBR drive but for some reason "en-us_windows_10_enterprise_ltsc_2021_x64_dvd_d289cf96" gives me a hassle.
Well, I never had the problem, so I never tried to solve/workaround it. Sorry. But you may try to use a older ISO (say 2004 or 1809) and replacing it's install.wim with the one you intend to install.
No luck with the install.wim from 1809. Thanks for the suggestion anyway and no worries about not being able to help. The new puzzle for me is I've read suggestions about changing the boot method in my BIOS to legacy instead of UEFI and the weird part is when I do it doesn't find my OS. So I have an MBR drive which should boot in legacy mode but doesn't, it only boots in UEFI mode which apparently shouldn't be possible, but then its recognized as MBR and won't let me convert to GPT.
Enterprise 2021 LTSC = Win 10 and still runs on all ancient hardware including Legacy BIOS/MBR systems, only Win 11 21H2 and up officially requires UEFI/GPT but since (actually before) day one we got a tool that makes it work on most ancient hardware.
I mean I don't get it myself, from everything Windows is telling me I have a UEFI/MBR system which I'm reading online shouldn't be possible (BIOS mode in msinfo listed as UEFI, diskpart shows my C: drive and all its partitions are NOT GPT). For what its worth since my laptop drive is running nice and pretty with 21h2 (and it is GPT) I decided to grab it, connect it to my desktop and boot from it, installed Starfield, and surprise the game runs (not gonna say it runs fine. Very first thing I got was a Building Shaders message in the main menu but hey it launches at least) so the 2021 ISO does work but somethings wrong with my desktop in a way that I just can't upgrade. I think in the end I'm gonna go with my previous idea of getting a separate drive, attaching it to my laptop, doing a clean install and when everything is setup swapping it with my desktops C: drive. Thank you at least to everyone that chimed in and hopefully my problems helped guide somebody else to getting the game working.
Win10 Pro 22H2 x64 runs on such hardware too without any hacks (tested, confirmed, no issues). Win10 Enterprise LTSC 2021 = Win10 Enterprise 21H2, so it is older than the above and as such it has to work either.
No need to go to a such complicate path, just deploy a fresh install in a native vhdx and add it to your bootloader, then dual boot with it. (the vhdx can be either GPT or MBR, no matter what your physical drive is initialized)
Dual booting is an option but I wanted to avoid it since its annoying having to close out everything else I have open and reboot just for one game and I can technically do that now anyway since I dual booted with my laptops drive and got the game running there so I can always just do that. I'm looking right now to see if I actually CAN run it through a VM with Hyper-V and apparently "paravirtualization". I'm not looking for 4K 120fps (at least not until more mods come out that fix the usual jank) so I don't mind if it hurts my performance a bit.
I just responded to the separate drive thing. For Hyper-V if you want to have any hope to play games with it, just use remotefx (which MS removed since april 2021) so use anything before that date (or https://forums.mydigitallife.net/th...-ro-restore-it-after-april-2021-solved.83764/ )
"One year and a half later" Holy hell and you're telling me a clean OS is to much work. Seriously though congrats on getting remotefx working, I'll look into your post as well and see what I end up doing. Also I see what you mean about the separate drive thing.
Well it's not like I worked on it for more than an year, I just waited for someone smarter than me for a while, just blocking the updates to march 2021. Then I decided to pull the trigger, tried different approaches and ended to what I shared publicly. Few days spent on it but a method that still works today (19045.3393), sparing me huge amounts of time each time I need a new VM.
My reply was about the one claiming that Enterprise 2021 LTSC requires UEFI/GPT and i replied it is still win 10 and doesn't require UEFI/GPT and said that starting with Win 11 22000 (21H2) the new requirements officially need to be met and with that i said there is a tool from before 22000 was released that offers multiple bypasses for the new requirements.