How to upgrade from Win10 or Win 11 to Win 11 24h2 on incompatible hardware - A guide

As many of us has already found out, Win10 21h2 or Win10 22h2 or Win 11 21h2 or Win 11 22h2 or Win 11 23h2 installed on an incompatible hardware doesn't upgrade by itself to Win 11 24h2.

You have to use the Repair install method or In-Place Upgrade , that is, run setup.exe from a mounted and tweaked Win 11 22h2 iso or Win 11 23h2 iso.

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You need Win11 23h2 iso file and Win11 24h2 iso file
Download Win11 23h2 iso file
Download Win 11 23h2 iso file

Download Win11 24h2 iso file

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Tweeking the installation files

Right click on the Win11_23H2_x64.iso file and select Mount.
On the virtual drive select ALL files and folders and select copy.

Or

If you have a Win11_23h2 USB installation drive, select ALL files and folders and select copy.


Create a Win11_23h2 folder. Paste the files on it.
Make sure "Hide known extensions" is NOT set under Explorer options.
Go to Win11_23h2\Sources and rename appraiserres.dll to appraiserres.dll.orig
On Win11_23h2\Sources, create a blank text file and rename to appraiserres.dll
On Win11_23h2\Sources, delete install.wim (or install.esd)
Right click on the Win11_24H2_x64.iso file and select Mount.
On the virtual drive select sources\install.wim or install.esd and select copy.
Go to Win11_23h2\Sources and paste the install.wim or install.esd
Rename Win11_23h2 folder to Win11_24h2 folder
Run Win11_24h2\Setup.exe
First, you must disconnect from the internet before attempting to upgrade an unsupported device to Win 11 24h2.
Second, you must choose how Setup checks for updates as 'not for now'.

Type the following command to run the Windows 11 setup bypassing the hardware requirements and press Enter:

Nice one, Megahertz

Just to add, Rufus has released a beta v4.6, that should now work with in-place upgrades.

antspants said:

Nice one, Megahertz

Just to add, Rufus has released a beta v4.6, that should now work with in-place upgrades.

Rufus - Create bootable USB drives the easy way

Rufus: Create bootable USB drives the easy way

rufus.ie

Release Rufus 4.6 BETA · pbatard/rufus

Add a new setup.exe wrapper to bypass Windows 11 24H2 in-place upgrade restrictions (#2568) Add TimeZone to regional options replication (#2499) Set local account passwords to not expire by default...

github.com

Click to expand...

Thanks antspants
Microsoft put a bunch of engineers to block Win 11 to be installed on incompatible hardware and there are thousands hackers around the word finding a way to bypass the restrictions.

Megahertz said:

Thanks antspants
Microsoft put a bunch of engineers to block Win 11 to be installed on incompatible hardware and there are thousands hackers around the word finding a way to bypass the restrictions.

Click to expand...

I know right. I wonder how much pocket money they threw away on that venture

still this 24h2 upgrade may still not work when attempting to do this on very old CPUs without SSE4.2 & Popcnt support
just needed to point this out for the OP to be aware of this

erpster4 said:

still this 24h2 upgrade may still not work when attempting to do this on very old CPUs without SSE4.2

Click to expand...

It won’t, you’re right. Not even with all the fairy dust in the world sprinkled on the PC.

Brink said:

Bypass Windows 11 System Requirements Tutorial

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 PC that doesn't meet these requirements. Installing Windows 11 on a device that does not meet Windows 11 minimum system...

www.elevenforum.com

Click to expand...

Hi, Shawn
I don’t see anywhere on that page where it says you can bypass SSE 4.2 requirements? Unless I missed it?
Members that have attempted to, end up in an endless loop of Windows trying to boot into 24H2.

Corr

antspants said:

Hi, Shawn
I don’t see anywhere on that page where it says you can bypass SSE 4.2 requirements? Unless I missed it?
Members that have attempted to, end up in an endless loop of Windows trying to boot into 24H2.

Click to expand...

Correct. Some systems are even too old for this.

Hi,

I am planning a clean install of Windows 11 24H2 on 3 of my PCs with CPUs: i9-9900k (Win 11 23H2), i7-7700k (Win 11 21H2) and i7-4710MQ (Win 11 23H2). I have been able to install Windows 11 23H2 on the i7-4710MQ using Rufus 4.5 for the hardware requirements.

The requirement for SSE 4.2 is confusing. Windows PC Health Check indicates that the i9-9900K will be fine but both i7-7700k and i7-4710MQ won't be supported, however according to cpu-world.com all three have SSE4.2 & Popcnt support (see links below).

i9-9900k: https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Core_i9/Intel-Core i9 i9-9900K.html
i7-7700k: https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Core_i7/Intel-Core i7 i7-7700K.html
i7-4710MQ : https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Core_i7/Intel-Core i7-4710MQ Mobile processor.html

Note that Intel document for the i7-7700k did mention the Popcnt :
HSM157. POPCNT Instruction May Take Longer to Execute Than Expected
Problem: POPCNT instruction execution with a 32 or 64 bit operand may be delayed until previous non-dependent instructions have executed.
Implication: Software using the POPCNT instruction may experience lower performance than expected.
Workaround: None identified.
Status: For the steppings affected, see the Summary Table of Changes.

Why are these last two CPUs not validated for Win 11 24H2's CPU requirement by Windows Health Check even with SSE 4.2?
Will a Registry edit help bypass the CPU requirement, since it is not provided by Rufus 4.6Beta, and will the resulting Win 11 24H2 install be viable for them?

Thank you for your help clarifying

Hi, Welcome

dpluigi said:

Why are these last two CPUs not validated for Win 11 24H2's CPU requirement by Windows Health Check even with SSE 4.2?

Click to expand...

Not sure

dpluigi said:

i7-7700k

Click to expand...

Instruction Set Extensions - Intel® SSE4.1, Intel® SSE4.2, Intel® AVX2

dpluigi said:

i7-4710MQ

Click to expand...

Instruction Set Extensions - Intel® SSE4.1, Intel® SSE4.2, Intel® AVX2

Can't imagine what the problem would be?


There is this:


Or You could use Rufus:

FreeBooter said:

Type the following command to run the Windows 11 setup bypassing the hardware requirements and press Enter:

Code:

setup.exe /product server

Click to expand...

That fix worked for me last week upgrading my 'incompatible' 2014 Dell laptop. All works fine.

I am wondering if those tricks have platform related issues. It seems they are more suited for Intel CPU. For AMD cpus, some of them does not work such as Rufus.

zachforever said:

I am wondering if those tricks have platform related issues. It seems they are more suited for Intel CPU. For AMD cpus, some of them does not work such as Rufus.

Click to expand...

Rufus works just fine as long as your CPU has SSE 4.2

There is a new Rufus Beta Update 4.6 that has incorporated new code to allow an in-place upgrade which can be activated by running setup.exe from within Windows using the Rufus created USB.

but never give up! never surrender... (I know there's someone out there creating a custom ISO)

Megahertz said:

Thanks @antspants
Microsoft put a bunch of engineers to block Win 11 to be installed on incompatible hardware and there are thousands hackers around the word finding a way to bypass the restrictions.

Click to expand...

Doubt it. More like students - nephews/children/friends of some higher-up (nepotism done right, well... wrong for the users :). Either that (highly incapable - but hey, they got eat and be able afford millions $ houses too) or they weren't serious about it. Then again, since this update/upgrade is a complete mess (there's way to many issues for systems that are officially supported) - there's probably way to many nephews among the current Windows devs. So even if the system supports it - i'd wait until the experiences devs (or at least more capable) - get to save the day - till all the major bugs/issues get cleared with a future update. As for older - unsupported systems (with a simple bypass - like the previous major Windows build) - just wait till Windows 23H2 goes EOL - and switch to a Linux distribution ZorinOS:


...or Linux Mint. With all the scripts and overly complicated measure to force a broken Windows - not really worth all that stress for unsupported systems. It's way simpler to learn the few things you might need to run a Free OS with no restrictions. Unless you use all those systems - for specific Windows app which can't be run on a Linux OS (such as competitive Online Games and their Kernel Level Anti-cheat). Quite a lot of Windows apps work just fine fine - even on ZorinOS Linux (some Windows users find this easier - since it's made for Windows user specifically) or Linux Mint (this one offers a cleaner experience - if you wanna learn some new things - kinda like using an Android phone for the 1st time - which also Linux based).

antspants said:

Hi, Welcome




Not sure


Instruction Set Extensions - Intel® SSE4.1, Intel® SSE4.2, Intel® AVX2

Instruction Set Extensions - Intel® SSE4.1, Intel® SSE4.2, Intel® AVX2

Can't imagine what the problem would be?


There is this:

Bypass Windows 11 System Requirements Tutorial

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 PC that doesn't meet these requirements. Installing Windows 11 on a device that does not meet Windows 11 minimum system...

www.elevenforum.com

Or You could use Rufus:

Release Rufus 4.6 BETA · pbatard/rufus

Add a new setup.exe wrapper to bypass Windows 11 24H2 in-place upgrade restrictions (#2568) Add TimeZone to regional options replication (#2499) Set local account passwords to not expire by default...

github.com

Click to expand...

Hi Antspants,
Thank you for clarifying and confirming that although the CPUs (i-4710MQ and i7-7700K) from two of my three systems meet the CPU minimum requirements (SSE4.2 and POPcnt), they did not make the supported CPU shortlist published by Microsoft. It gives me the confidence to try and test and I was planning to install Win11 24H2 with Rufus 4.6Beta on the i-4710MQ as a test bed since it was recently updated with a clean install of Win 11 23H2 and not many programs were reinstalled.

Then the i7-7700K second oldest (custom-built 7 years ago) will get a clean install. Hopefully running Win11 24H2 on these two systems detected as umcompatibe will not be an issue in the long run.

The third system i9-9900K is fully compatible but, as my main system has a lot more data and programs, it requires the process and Windows updates and bugs to be ironed out and will benefit from waiting out a little.

dpluigi said:

I was planning to install Win11 24H2 with Rufus 4.6Beta

Click to expand...

Hi there.

I updated my unsupported 2014 built PC using Rufus 4.5 but I used the registry hacks that have now been added to the Rufus 4.6 beta. I have every confidence it will work well for you.

antspants said:

Rufus works just fine as long as your CPU has SSE 4.2

There is a new Rufus Beta Update 4.6 that has incorporated new code to allow an in-place upgrade which can be activated by running setup.exe from within Windows using the Rufus created USB.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the update. I am using an old version of Rufus 4.3 and yes, the CPU supports SSE4.2 (AMD Ryzen 1500X)