Does Rufus Still Work ?

Thanks for that......the laptop I am trying to install W11 on is a Toshiba L670-1J8 model, and is I think about FOURTEEN years old, as are all the Toshiba one's I have, it was originally a W7 machine, successfully updated to W10, as they all were......I guess they are probably just too old to run W11, but thought it worth a try.....if anyone can tell me how to disable secure boot it might help, but from what I can see there is NO option to do that on these older machines.....I do have W11 on a fairly new Dell machine, but hate to think that these old Toshiba's are destined for landfill.....oh well, progress I guess !!......

You put 24H2 on that and you’re going to be disappointed. It’ll run like a bag of…

BUT there are a few members here that have worked with PC’s that used to belong to Moses and have done OK, sort of. But I’d suggest 23H2, which actually gets retired in Nov, but members like @Bree may be able to advise.

P.S.
A laptop like that, I doubt has UEFI, if it does it’ll be via the BIOS. I’m not that clued in so another member can advise. So your Partition probably needs to be/or is already MBR as does that setting in Rufus (Number 3 in my settings image)

Did you use that tutorial to find the partition scheme?

EDIT: I had a look, no UEFI that I can see.

Mmmhhh......al is probably not lost !!.......my main laptop (the one I am using now) DOES have the facility to turn Secure Boot, on and off.....it's also a Toshiba Satellite but slightly newer than the others.......the plan is to create a W10 ISO, in case things go wrong, and then attempt to install W11 on THIS machine.....fingers crossed !!......

Nope.....still won't recognise the flash drive......just about to give up !!.......

Del 80 said:

.....the laptop I am trying to install W11 on is a Toshiba L670-1J8 model, and is I think about FOURTEEN years old, as are all the Toshiba one's I have, it was originally a W7 machine, successfully updated to W10, as they all were......I guess they are probably just too old to run W11, but thought it worth a try.....

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antspants said:

You put 24H2 on that and you’re going to be disappointed. It’ll run like a bag of…

BUT there are a few members here that have worked with PC’s that used to belong to Moses and have done OK, sort of. But I’d suggest 23H2, which actually gets retired in Nov, but members like @Bree may be able to advise.

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The Toshiba L670 had an Intel Pentium P6200. This is too old for 24H2, it lacks the SSE4.2 instruction set without which 24H2 cannot run. Your L670 cannot run anything higher than 23H2.

Del 80 said:

.......my main laptop (the one I am using now) DOES have the facility to turn Secure Boot, on and off.....it's also a Toshiba Satellite but slightly newer than the others.......

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Secure boot is not essential, that requirement (and TPM, CPU, etc.) can be bypassed with a workaround. The only hard requirement for 24H2 is SSE4.2. I have installed 24H2 on a slightly newer Toshiba Satellite than your L670, a Legacy bios/MBR machine - but it does have SSE4.2.

Bree said:

Now 24H2 is in General Availability I've just repeated the clean install test on the same (very) unsupported device, a Toshiba Satellite L750 from circa 2011.

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Thanks for that......I'm just wondering WHY it won't recognise the flash drive ?.......

Does it recognize and boot a clonezilla live flash drive?

Del 80 said:

Thanks for that......I'm just wondering WHY it won't recognise the flash drive ?.......

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Did you make the flash drive with Rufus? Did you configure it for Legacy boot or just UEFI?

I used a standard install USB made with Microsoft's Media Creation Tool. Try turning off Secure boot in the bios, and enabling Legacy USB support (often referred to as CSM). Then use a standard USB with the workarounds for a clean install (Option Two) or an upgrade (Option Three) here:

Bree said:

Did you make the flash drive with Rufus? Did you configure it for Legacy boot or just UEFI?

I used a standard install USB made with Microsoft's Media Creation Tool. Try turning off Secure boot in the bios, and enabling Legacy USB support (often referred to as CSM). Then use a standard USB with the workarounds for a clean install (Option Two) or an upgrade (Option Three) here:

Bypass Windows 11 System Requirements on Unsupported PC

This tutorial will show you how to bypass the Windows 11 CPU, RAM, Secure Boot, and TPM 2.0 system requirements allowing you to clean install or upgrade to Windows 11 on a unsupported PC that doesn't meet these requirements. Installing Windows 11 on a device that does not meet Windows 11...

www.elevenforum.com

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All this has been suggested but not much in a way of detailed responses have been provided to the suggestions, from memory.
I included a pretty extensive Rufus tutorial/steps, I believe Kelper suggested secure boot changes etc etc

Hi folks.

@Del 80
try running diskpart in administrator mode. You might see that the disk is offline. -If that's the case select disk <disk nr of offlined disk> and then online <that disk>

OK might not be the solution but always go for the "easiest" things first. Nothing to lose by just trying it. - This won't break or overwrite anything.

Example on this type of stuff : !!

I had the other day experience of a "so called" system admin taking 1.5 hrs with all sorts of totally rubbish advice while giving a junior trainee I.T guy absolute b/s on trying to clone a Windows VM running on "kvm/quemu" linux host.

Fortunately she (I'm not sexist but IMHO some women -- not all I must add --I have had some excellent women project managers in my time -- always seem to try and do to much "micro managing" which inevitably ends up in tears (for both manager and those being managed") got some sort of call so she went away. I took the guy aside and just said --here just logon to the virt-manager GUI app -- and run "clone VM". -- finished / working -- 10 mins !!! and I'm not being paid €95,000 a year either !!!

(And my speciality is electrical engineering -- not computer science etc).

Cheers
jimbo

Del 80 said:

Thanks for that......I'm just wondering WHY it won't recognise the flash drive ?.......

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Try booting any other drive - eg a linux usb. Just to see if it will boot from usb. However, I do remember that when 7" netbooks with Intel GMA 3150 wouldn't run Windows 10 (they came with XP and would run Windows 7), that on attempting to boot, it would just fail - it just wouldn't boot something it couldn't deal with. You can test that out by trying to boot something else.

If, as Bree says, it's not going to run Windows 11 24H2 then there isn't much point putting Windows 11 on it at all, because 23H2 stops being supported in October (although technically it should run 23H2).

If it ran Windows 7 before, then it will run Windows 10 - so you could install Windows 10 and sign up for the ESU (extended support) for a year until Nov 2026. After that it's uncertain.

Another thought - could it be infected? If it won't boot anything at all that might be a possibility. So a good test would be to make a linux usb stick and try booting that (although they can be pernicketty as well!). Or does it have a dvd drive? Or do you have an external dvd drive? I had one older machine I used to have to boot from cd/external usb dvd drive, because it just didn't like booting from usb's for some reason. Maybe older hardware prefers/recognises older hardware! Another time I had one that would only accept a usb2 stick, not a usb3 stick.

You could make a parted magic linux usb stick (but that isn't free - about £11 I think) which always boots and boots from ram and lets you wipe the drive, repartition and all sorts. And if that doesn't boot then it's because secure boot is turned on - it's about the only thing that stops it booting.

If it's infected, then erasing the drive would sort it maybe. (Or just swap the hard drive!).

Thank you, and everyone else who tried to help......it' all gotten rather to technical for me I'm afraid......I'm looking at buying a new W11 laptop......which is what Microsoft wanted all along.......God bless you all.........

Yes these things get too much. I have an old one that won't run Windows 11 either - it will run Windows 10 or Linux though I didn't want it just sitting there with nothing on it so have Linux on it. Linux isn't for everyone, but if you wanted to breathe some new life into them you could try downloading Linux Mint and installing that It is the most windows like one apparently and most people find it easy to use. You would need the lightest xfce version. Just download it from their website, and burn that to a usb (using rufus again but I think when you get to a certain point it asks if you want to burn it as ISO or DD and in my experience it only works if you choose dd) When you've had a breather!

If it's too much hassle, then just stick em in the loft! And decide what to do with them some time in the future. I have a box full of things like that and don't like just throwing them away! New Windows 11 laptops aren't cheap but there are some good deals for midrange laptops. You'd really want at least core i5 and 16gb ram, because most of them now don't have upgradeable ram so you can't increase it later. And 16gb is about what's needed these days and also fairly futureproof.

This is a basic one that does everything needed. It only has 8gb ram but I believe the ram is upgradeable on this model. It has 2 x 4gb so they could be replaced with two x 8gb in future.


This one costs a bit more but has 16gb ram

I tried it yesterday and it did not work. I had a fresh download of Win11 from the MSFT site. I received the same results using Rufus as I did with the installed version on a brand new Lenovo P16 Gen 2. When I get to the "Setting up for work or school" page the install errors out on "Device setup".

I called Lenovo Premium support and was told to create the Lenovo Recovery USB Key, which downloads the image from the Lenovo site then writes it to a USB stick. Same results. Twice.

Next I downloaded the image from the MSFT site. Same results.

Finally I created a Rufus boot stick using the image downloaded from MSFT. Same results.

I created a new user login to @outlook.com to insure I had a valid Microsoft account. My existing accounts didn't work and neither did the new account.

It's just me, so I don't know why the installation would look for:

Security policies
Certificates

as part of a regular setup.

See attached screen shots.

@Kelly16 Your device appears to be joining some company's Intune/Entra ID environment.

I've opened a case with MSFT. We'll see how well that goes. The first level tech is stymied, so he's sending it to the next level. I really don't want to have to switch to MacOS.

Kelly16 said:

I've opened a case with MSFT. We'll see how well that goes. The first level tech is stymied, so he's sending it to the next level. I really don't want to have to switch to MacOS.

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If your device is brand new, send it back. It certainly looks like it's tied to a company's management environment. Either a company bought it and returned it, or someone misconfigured it and tied it to a company by mistake. Regardless, a device purchased for home use should not be doing this.

Kelly16 said:

I really don't want to have to switch to MacOS.

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Please post us a photo of your new Mac with this thread in a browser showing on the screen, when you do.

The issue was PEBCAK* -- me! I'm used to F10 being F10, but once the OS loads FN + F10 is the effective F10. I was able to Shift + FN + F10 and get a command shell into which I entered the command OOBE\BYPASSNRO. The install process restarted and I created a local account. Once Windows 11 Pro was installed, I turned on WiFi and started updating.

I'm getting an OWC ThunderBay 4 (www.owc.com) today and I've got four 10TB drives to install in it. I'll also license the SoftRAID driver for my desktop so I can connect the ThunderBay 4 array to the desktop and the file system is preserved.

Without the ability to create a local account I would not have been able to complete installation.

I know that the US DoD and IC community use Windows 11 Pro on air-gapped networks, so I knew there was a way to install without being connected to the 'Net.

Thanks to all for your input. It was simple user error.

*Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard