You Might Want To Hold Onto An Old Version Of The Windows 11 Installer
A new Canary build of Windows 11 has dropped and among the various new features and changes is one that might upset those who like to install Windows 11 on old hardware. There is a workaround that lets you upgrade to Windows 11 on a Win10 machine that lacks TPM 2.0 or any of the other arbitrary hardware requirements Microsoft applied to their installer. The process works by having your system impersonate a server, though it will only upgrade your machine to the version of Windows 11 that matches your Windows 10 install. It’s not a clean install, but setup.exe /product server is the easiest way to upgrade a non-compliant system to Windows 11.
In the new Windows Insider build 27686, this no longer works and as of yet The Register has not been able to confirm if this Microsoft intended to block this upgrade path or if it was an unintentional side effect of other changes to Windows. This is also the update that finally frees FAT32 from it’s 32GB imprisonment.
The registry edit during a clean install of Windows 11 should still allow you to successfully image a machine lacking TPM 2.0 or other requirements, and is still your best bet if this is your plan. That install will be unsupported of course, though how many of us are willing to spend several hundred dollars for a support request with Microsoft to investigate our personal computers.
I wonder if this will prompt me to finally reimage my old Threadripper 1950X system.
