Enable Secure Boot on MBR Drive

Question

Enable Secure Boot on MBR Drive

Anonymous

I'm trying to upgrade my hard drive from windows 11, but secure boot is not enabled. Looking into it, it looks like this is because the hard drive running windows has an MBR formatting and was not booting using UEFI (I've been cloning the same hard drive I bought in 2013).

I have a second hard drive that I was able to create a GPT format with a FAT32 EFI partition, however I'm not sure where to go from here.

It's apparently very difficult to clone the hard drive running the windows OS across formats and I can't reformat the MBR drive with windows because then it would delete the OS. I'm not sure what to do.

I think I probably need to do a fresh install using the second option on this page:

Download Windows 11 (microsoft.com)

But I wanted to check if anyone else has any insights.

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Answer 1

Hi MAx,

I'm Sumit, here to answer your query at the Microsoft Community.

Use the MBR2GPT tool to convert MBR to GPT. It is a prerequisite of Windows 11. After that, we will enable Secure boot.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/for...

Windows has an in-built tool, called MBR2GPT which can help to convert a Legacy Windows 10 Installation(also called MBR), to modern UEFI, based on a GPT partition scheme. There are multiple steps involved in the process and some pre-requisites, discussed below:

Pre-requisites:

The MBR disk must have at most 3-partitions.

The OS must be 64-bit.

Bitlocker or encryption must be turned off.

There should be an Operating system on the disk.

One of the partitions must be active(confirm that from disk Management).

No dual boot.

Windows 10 version must be at least version 1703.

To boot to WinRE, from where Windows can trigger the MBR2GPT tool, please see the steps below:

On the Lock screen, press and hold the Shift key while choosing Restart from the Power menu. Continue pressing the shift key until you see the Windows Recovery environment, asking you to select an option.

Click Troubleshoot>Advanced options>Command Prompt.

The computer would restart.

Login to your account.

On the Command Prompt Window, our next step would be to check if the tool can convert the disk to GPT. To do this, execute the following command:

mbr2gpt.exe /validate

The output should tell you if the validation is successful. If the disk is validated, conversion is possible.

Step 3: Convert the disk.

The next step is to convert the disk. For that, use the /convert switch.

mbr2gpt.exe /convert

The process would take some minutes and tell you the output.

I hope this helps.

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Enable Secure Boot on MBR Drive

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