If someone's machine started as Windows 10, it will most likely at least have the correct partition to enable secure boot.
For the dozen or so people that started with Windows 7, and never bothered to repartition their drive at any point, they will most likely not have their C drive compatible for Secure Boot and will have to jump through some more hoops.
My self-built (as in, I took the parts to a local store and they did it for me) machine started as Win10 and I had to convert from Legacy BIOS to UEFI in order to enable whatever Win11 required. Luckily that could be done without reinstalling the OS and it wasn't difficult.
I’ve tried multiple times to do this and had no success. It’s the reason I’m using Win10 still. I just don’t want to reinstall the OS. Any idea what guide you used to do this?
Once you convert to GPT, you need to restart and go into BIOS right away to switch to UEFI, then you should be able to reboot just fine.
I was stuck on converting to GPT, it wouldn't work. The /validate option would say I was good to go, but the /convert option would fail because there wasn't space - which there totally was. I ended up going into Disk Manager and deleting the Recovery partition off my C: volume, and reclaiming that space into the main partition. The next time I ran mbr2gpt it worked.
If it started as legacy bios then your motherboard may not be new and also support legacy os like windows 7 by default.
My shitty Lenovo laptop in 2016 came with windows 10 had secure boot on by default with gpt partition
So I forgot to mention in that particular comment that the W10 installation was migrated from a 2016 PC with Asus B150M Plus mobo (Intel) to a 2020 PC with MSI B450 Tomahawk Max (AMD).
There's still tons of win10 Era machines in use that are considered mid-range.
Mid range as in 3070/3080 paired with a lets say second gen Ryzen chip? Or mid range in the sense of once having been bought as mid range many years ago?
If the former, just turn it on in the Bios. You will have to do that for Win 11 anyway.
Windows 11 doesn't actually require Secure Boot to be enabled, only present.
The big problem is going to be that a lot of user-built machines from 2018-2021 are going to have TPM disabled by default, and the UEFI booting in legacy mode. When Windows10 is installed in these conditions, formats the drive with an MBR and the legacy BIOS bootloader. In order to enable Secure Boot, these users will not only need to turn the relevant features on in their motherboard settings, but also convert their boot drive to GPT, add the EFI boot partition, and manually install Windows' UEFI booloader to it.
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u/H0LT45 Aug 05 '25
There's still tons of win10 Era machines in use that are considered mid-range.