I'm trying to install Windows 11 on a Zotac Magnus ER-51070. AMD Ryzen™ 5 1400 (upgraded to 1700X - do not do that, it really stresses the power MOSFETs) GeForce® GTX 1070 8GB (upgraded to RTX 4060 8GB) 32 GB RAM The Zotac is running Windows 22H2. First I have tried an inplace upgrade, using the "/product server" parameter, because the Zotac has no TPM2 and the CPU is unsupported. The installation failed and rolled back to Windows 10. I created an installation USB media, tried to boot it and it restarted in a very early stage (static Windows logo, without the spinning circle) of the boot process. I cloned the Windows 10 installation and tried the inplace upgrade to 11 on two ther PCs and it worked flawlessly on both, both older than the Zotac. Then I tried to boot the disks with the upgraded system on the Zotac and again a reboot in the early stage of the boot process (then trying automatic repair and so on and on). Now the interresting part, the original Windows 10 installation on the Zotac is MBR and boots in Legacy/CSM mode. If I take a cloned disk (already upgraded to Windows 11), boot to the command prompt (after a failed automatic repair process) and switch to GPT and EFI using mbr2gpt /convert - it boots to Windows 11 on the Zotac - but only once. After a reboot the same reboot/repair/reboot game starts again. I also created a Windows 11 ToGo media and it boots on very single PC I've tried, just not the Zotac ... Any ideas?
If he replaced the drive with one containing an existing win 11 install the boot.wim registry mod would not fix it either,
Thanks for the feedback. Perhaps a live kernel-mode debugging (using WinDbg or such) is required to pin-point the exact issue, but can you at least take a look at the event logs (in case of the cloned disk approach) from a Windows 10-based PE? Also, what happens if you try to install/apply Windows 11 in the legacy BIOS mode and boot it? @NICK@NUMBER11 As mentioned by @Enthousiast, the user is not after yet another installation bypass method. The anomaly is lying elsewhere.
I'm just in the process of restoring a backup of the Windows 11 MBR installation (upgraded to 11 on a different PC) and I'll try the mbr2gpt trick. If it boots I'll keep it running and try to look through the logs. EFI or Legacy, the installation behaves the same - reboot in the early stage. WinDbg - have to read something about it first, never done something like that. I have tried the debuging mode from the boot mode selection, also safe mode, without drivers signatures enforcement etc. - nothing - reboot in the early stage.
I'm not able to reproduce the successful boot situation reliably, it almost seems, that a successful boot is a glitch. I was able to boot it once, I looked through the system logs - nothing suspicious. The booted system looked perfectly normal and fine. I did a full backup - doesn't boot after a restore. I enabled bootlog - after a reboot it does not even create an empty file. It seems the restart happens even before the system starts to load any drivers ... not sure if I can do anything to solve it. And not sure about WinDbg - lets assume it shows it's not able to load winload, ntoskernel or something like that, what then ...? (I admit I just started reading about debugging.)
Some progress. I tried to install an older version of Windows 11 (21H2) and it works! Now I have to upgrade it to the latest, if it still works. It will take some time, it's painfully slow - it's on a spinning drive.