A lot of people think they understand something, when they really don’t at all. They have no idea what they are doing!

See how this competent person figured out someone else wasn’t.

The Windows 11 upgrade

One time a friend asked me if I could come over over the weekend and help fix the WIFI. I said sure and we agreed on a time and day.

I go over, fix the WIFI, nice and easy. I had some free time left so I asked if he wanted me to upgrade his PC to Win11 since he was still playing on 10.

That turned out to be a mistake.

“Oh, it doesn’t support 11.” he says.

“What do you mean it doesn’t support 11?” — I asked. “You built it just a few months ago. It’s all new hardware. It should have no problems running 11.”

So I checked and sure enough, PC-Healthcheck said it didn’t support secure boot.

That’s odd — I thought. Checked the motherboard specs. It did support secure boot.

I entered the BIOS, set secure boot instead of legacy and restarted. Didn’t boot. Okay?

Reverted and booted it back up. Then I tried to check if the boot partition was OK and if everything needed for secure boot was enabled. It was all correct.

The mystery continues.

Okay, now what? I tried to update the BIOS and it failed. Tried to boot in safe mode. Didn’t work.

I tried every I could and I still stared perplexed at the screen for almost an hour.

And then I had the idea to maybe check the partition type on the boot drive. It was MBR.

Turns out, he asked a friend who was “tech savvy” and “regularly did such things” to help build his PC and install Windows on it.

Now it’s all making sense.

Nobody in their right mind would install Windows with MBR on a modern system in the past decade.

Alright then, quick fix. Admin powershell in winroot. mbr2gpt. Enter BIOS, set secure boot and upgrade.

Lesson learned: never take GPT for granted or assume that the guy who worked on something before you knew what they were doing and didn’t make mistakes.

Later I got to meet this friend. Turns out, that he most usually installed cracked versions of Windows for people, for which he needed MBR to install, and my friend had a legitimate key, he used MBR out of habit.

Here is what folks are saying.

Solidarity for the win!

You aren’t the only one.

Or he could just get a Mac and avoid all this.

Well, that’s awkward.

I doubt he’ll want to do this again.

I’m even more glad I use a Mac.

If you liked that story, check out this post about a group of employees who got together and why working from home was a good financial decision.