- USB Stick DOESN'T work!! incorrectly formatted for MBR instead of GPT! - Brett, 1 December 2024
Windows 11 requires TPM 2.0, and UEFI(Secure Boot) in order to be successfully installed.
An additional requirement is that the USB Stick that you install windows with must be formatted with GPT and not MBR.
So popping this bad boy in to my usb port and starting up the machine seems to work 100% at first until you're hit with a message from Windows stating that your machine doesn't meet the necessary requirements to install Windows.
Ok, so then proceeding to enable tpm 2.0 and secure boot is straight forward after watching some tutorials but then right after enabling secure boot, you will see that your machine boots in to the BIOS the entire time in a loop and refuses to begin the windows 11 installation.
You see, if the above requirements are not met, your machine will just keep booting in to the BIOS in a loop leaving you wondering what the heck is going on.
After some tinkering and fiddling it turns out that the usb stick that came with the FPP product was formatted for MBR by Microsoft and not GPT.
I know, I know! You're probably thinking it is something I'm doing wrong because how could Microsoft make such a fatal mistake when their own requirements for Windows 11 is a formatting for GPT, right?
However, this is a true story! I had to take one of my own USB sticks and use the media creation kit on a different Windows 11 machine and make a whole new bootable USB for windows.
The product key with the FPP product works fine as it registers directly with Microsoft but the fact that the usb drive doesn't work out of the box is just shocking to say the least!!
Here are some references to other people having the same problem:
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/windows-pro-11-fpp-usb-partition-wrong/c8358861-224f-4bc9-8b81-310b5e857c01
https://www.reddit.com/r/gigabyte/s/yb99axFnMa
So beware when buying this, you might need a spare windows 11 machine around and an available 16GB USB stick to get your installation going.
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