- Joined
- Feb 5, 2020
- Messages
- 74
- Motherboard
- Dell 9020 MT
- CPU
- i7-4790
- Graphics
- RX 570
- Mac
- Mobile Phone
To everyone who have been following and responding to my troubles regarding getting Windows 10 to work, booting from UEFI on my Dell Optiplex 9020 MT - thank you for your input, suggestions and interest along the way. I can finally say that I have managed to get it working. I will describe in detail what was tried during the process and how I finally managed to get it working. Hopefully no one else has to go through this, but if they do, perhaps they can be saved some frustration and follow what I did.
To reiterate, what I was trying to accomplish was:
What I had to start with:
What I tried:
What finally solved it:
The result:
To reiterate, what I was trying to accomplish was:
- MacOS on SSD #1 (which works flawlessly and has from the start)
- Windows 10 on SSD #2
- No shared boot - I can control (via external panel) which disk has power
What I had to start with:
- Dell Optiplex 9020 MT - originally delivered with Win 7 Pro, now long gone, but COA sticker with license present.
- AMT setting "1" (sticker on inside of chassis side)
- Upgraded from original 8GB RAM to 4x 8GB Timetec
- Added an NVMe
- Swapped the SSD it was delivered with to another
- BIOS settings as suggested in trs96's post on how to configure the PC for creating the Optimac
- All attempts at installing Windows 10 from a USB thumb drive failed in the sense that there was never created a proper EFI partition, so the install would never proceed after rebooting when the Windows Installer had copied files and prepared the installation.
- Only a small MSR partition and the data partition (for the Windows files, which were actually copied to the drive).
What I tried:
- Creating the USB thumb drive for Windows install using the Windows Media Creation tool and with Rufus, on both USB 2.0 and 3.0 thumb drives.
- Booting from both USB 2.0 and 3.0 ports, both front panel and rear panel
- Booting with and without Legacy Boot compatibility enabled
- Booting with and without Secure Boot enabled (including intercepting the boot after preparing the install with the thumb drive, but before the system attempted to boot from the SSD that now had the Windows install files on it)
- Attaching the SSD on both SATA-0 and SATA-1 (without any other SATA drives attached)
- Trying several SSDs to ensure that it wasn't related to the SSD itself
- Manually preparing the SSD with partitions, using Diskpart (Shift+F10 at first screen in Windows install to get to Command Prompt)
- Ensuring all along that the SSD was converted to GPT and not MBR
- Using both the Windows 7 Pro license (COA) from the sticker on the chassis as well as a Windows 10 Pro license (not OEM) that I own.
What finally solved it:
- Create a USB thumb drive for Windows 7 Pro install and install Windows 7 Pro
- Find old NIC driver and install them. This is needed to be able to get internet access going, so you can access Windows Update.
- Installing this driver will likely cause this error: "the procedure entry point adddlldirectory could not be located" so you will need to install this Microsoft Update to patch Windows first. That solution was found here.
- Activate Windows 7 Pro using the original Windows 7 Pro license (COA) that the computer came with.
- For me, that meant calling the Windows Activation service, but I attribute this to the fact that I had changed the hardware make-up substantially so that the hardware ID no longer matched what was stored with Microsoft)
- Download about a trillion Windows updates until there are finally no more to find (apart from a couple of security updates). I opted to get all of the optional updates as well, as I didn't want Windows to complain about anything missing when I proceeded to the final step:
- Download and do an in-place upgrade of Windows 7 Pro to Windows 10 Pro. This is done using the regular Windows 10 Media Creation tool), upgrading the Windows 7 Pro license to a digital Windows 10 Pro license.
- Yes, even if the free Windows 7 to Windows 10 upgrade program has actually expired, this still works as of April 4, 2020. See here for details.
The result:
- The process I followed has somehow allowed me to override the block that prevented creation of the right partitions on the SSD.
- The computer today operates on a digitally issued Windows 10 Pro license (converted from the Windows 7 Pro COA OEM license from the original sticker)
- The computer is set up using UEFI mode only (no Legacy mode enabled), the SSD is GPT and everything works.
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