Windows 11 is a free update for Windows 10 owners and the update will arrive through normal Windows update process. Windows 11 has some specific hardware/software requirements, that must be met before the update will start downloading. The full list of requirements can be viewed from Microsoft website. The one requirement that can cause issue (and which caused issue to me) is the requirement of UEFI. If you have updated your computer from Windows 8, you still might have a MBR boot section in-use, which means that your hard drive is not using the UEFI boot mode. To fix this we need to first change the boot section, then enable UEFI and TPM from BIOS.
How to upgrade to UEFI
The first problem with Windows 11 installation can be the lack of UEFI. There are few easy ways to check if the UEFI is enabled or not: First you can check the setting directly from BIOS boot settings, or you can run following commands in Windows:
1. Press the Win + R keys to open the Run window. Then, type “cmd” and press Enter.
2. Type bcdedit /enum and press Enter (requires Administrator rights for command prompt).
In Windows Boot Loader section you can see a path section which says something like this: path \WINDOWS\system32\winload.efi
If you have winload.exe there and not the winload.efi, you are not currently using the UEFI. To fix this we need to change the boot section from MBR to GPT and then enable the UEFI from BIOS, because the BIOS won’t recognize the hard drive boot section if it is using the old MBR with UEFI enabled. Microsoft has published very good and detailed guide how to update the boot section. The documentation can be found from here.
After updating the boot section and enabling UEFI from BIOS, we need to also enable TPM from BIOS. Every motherboard manufacturer has their own BIOS these days, so there is no general guideline how to do this. I used this MSI documentation for my Gaming Edge 570X motherboard and it worked fine.
After these changes the Windows 11 update started to download.
