So after I've bought the new SSD, I've now gone and installed it, and since this is a fresh new drive and my current Win10 installation was getting on quite a few years of age (I believe it started out life as a fairly early Win7 setup, and survived upgrades to 8, 8.1 and 10 in succession)... I decided to install a fresh OS on this one, and since Win11 is out and about, why not go for that, I thought.
As expected, this didn't go anywhere near as smoothly as I planned... Here's about how my evening went:
- Preparations made beforehand, a few days ago: activated TFP2 in the BIOS, and created a Win11 installer USB using the official Microsoft tool. Also let the compatibility check tool run, and confirm I'm good to go (important...).
- Shut down the PC, unplugged everything, opened her up. Put the M.2 SSD in the slot, marvelled at how tiny it is in comparison to everything else in there, even the RAM sticks are way larger, not speaking of 2.5" SATA drives and other stuff.
- Removed some dust from the fans
It was actually much less dusty than I expected, this case hasn't been open for a long while - I guess the regular robot vacuum runs do help keep the overall dust amount in the room down quite well.
- Unplugged the old system SSD. Had to look quite closely with a flashlight even which one it is, since I have 3x 2.5" SSDs in there at the moment, and they're all Samsungs
Thankfully the 830 has an older casing design than the slightly newer 750 EVO and 860 EVO, so I could make it out and unplug, without physically removing it from the case for now.
- Plugged in the prepared Win11 installer USB and fired her back up. Installer booted right up... only to say "Windows 11 cannot be installed on this computer". No further details, no info what it didn't like, error code, nothing. Great.
- Googled. Fairly quickly figured out I not only needed to enable TFP2, but also Secure Boot in the BIOS. Rebooted in there, spent good 10-15 minutes navigating menus looking for the exact sequence to do this (which ended up being something like "go to the boot menu, disable CFP and enable UEFI only, reboot, go to a completely different menu that has nothing with 'boot' in the name to find actual secure boot, try to enable it only to get an error in the face, google the error, switch secure boot mode to Custom, populate default keys, reboot again, enable secure boot" - perfectly straightforward, as you can see -.-).
- Ran the installer again, it's happy now and let me make very few choices before chugging away. Took all of ~3 minutes to copy files and do its thing before rebooting, and to my excitement booting straight from the new drive to continue the install. "Getting devices ready" and some other messages also chugged past within a few seconds, before the screen settled on "Getting ready..."... and sat there.
- For over an hour.
- At which point I decided this is not just taking too long but is actually frozen up, and rebooted it. Ofc it then said "unexpected reboot, please restart the installation". Which I then did a few times, trying all the recommended tricks online to deal with the issue - mainly unplugging all USB devices and network, and trying a different USB stick as the installation media. Which all did precisely nothing.
- After my Google-fu reached its limit, tried messaging a couple friends for help. One of them relayed a tale of installing Win10 on an M.2 drive a while back, which also had similar issues, and necessitated a BIOS update before it could work... hmm, this I didn't think about, especially not after the USB installer ran fine and the thing actually booted from the SSD afterwards. Still, let's look at the MSI website what they might have for my board.
- Well, isn't this just spiffy. This may just be our culprit here, my current BIOS is pretty recent, but not 2-months-ago recent for sure:
- After briefly figuring out how to update BIOS from a USB drive without a working OS on the machine, doing so, then having to re-enable all of the TFP2, Secure Boot shenaningans as well as my other BIOS settings (XMP profile, boot order, etc) from scratch, and then re-running the installer from the beginning again... IT WERKS! Installer ran as quickly as before, hung on the "Getting ready" screen for a minute, before quickly flashing through a few more messages and continuing into another reboot. Success!
- Booted into the post-setup configuration, quickly clicked through that, landed on a usable desktop finally, and took another couple hours to set up my usual stuff to get a usable system again.
But wait! That's not all. Two issues still remain after all of the above, which I don't feel like dealing with immediately, but will need attention some time soon:
- Weirdly, the only HDD I still have in the case miraculously vanished from BIOS detection lists and anywhere in the system some time during the process. I even re-opened the case to check if I accidentally unplugged its power or SATA cable while removing the old system SSD - no, it's all still in there. This either means there's either some weirdness going on with the SATA ports after removing one drive, or with the CFM/UEFI setup - or that the drive chose this very moment to decide it just doesn't wanna live anymore, being old and all. Which would be annoying, but not terribly bad, since it was mostly a data hoard with a bunch of old movies and series (including a full backlog of Top Gear), so nothing I can't restore over time, if I feel the need at all.
- Also, the system refuses to accept any of several Windows keys I have in storage, including one that happily ran the old Win10 system and was even accepted for a manual re-activation when it decided it needed one after one of the "Creator's updates" or some such stuff. The keys are sourced from back in the university, when I could get hold of Windows 7 and 8 Home licenses for free, so I got a few
But apparently the jig is up now. Will see what I do about that, for now it'll have to run without being activated, which at least in the beginning doesn't actually do anything of note.
Anyway, I'm running Windows 11 now, on a blazing fast new SSD. Is it actually any different or faster to use? Tbh, I think in daily driving I won't notice much of a difference, really. Even though the 830 was getting really old and the transfer rates are massively faster now, it was still easily fast enough to boot the system in seconds and launch most any apps instantaneously, so I'm not even sure why I bothered in the first place - apart from 250GB being a bit small for a system drive after a while, I guess. Oh well.