Emergency Windows (Reloaded)

I posted about my backup Windows setup several months ago when my primary laptop died during a business trip. It came back to life later but then died again and the verdict was - replace the motherboard.

This time it died after I returned home, so the overall conditions were more manageable.  It took end-to-end full two weeks to have the computer replaced and reconfigured again (more on that below). After leaving the broken MacBook at an (authorized) Apple repair shop, I blew the dust from the Panda and hooked it up to the giant curved Philips USB-C monitor. It worked right away and the most beautiful part of the setup was the single cable connecting the monitor with the machine. USB-C, when properly implemented with all its features (high speed data, video lanes and power delivery), does wonders.

What was a bit surprising, the Panda-based setup was not that much different from my high-end (albeit ageing) 2018 i9 MacBook Pro. In typical office work it was a tad slower and I also had to close the excessive unused browser tabs to release some memory for Zoom screen sharing. But other than that it was the same feel, especially as I was using the same monitor, the same keyboard and the same mouse.

This very practical backup workstation offered me some extra time to properly configure the new (old) MacBook. The new motherboard meant the storage (know as disk) has been bran new, so everything was to be reinstalled from scratch. Running Windows on a MacBook, I use Apple's "bootcamp" subsystem, and I had never bothered to create a full "backup image". I mean I had tried but the MacOS backup utility was taking days to back the machine up. Instead I regularly use Syncovery to back up well organized user data folders (photos, documents, etc.). Backing up the entire thing means patches and updates accumulate, and from time to time it is good to perform a clean install. The last time I did a clean install was 6 years ago. That also gave me the opportunity to install Windows 11.

Unfortunately mostly all went wrong during the clean install procedure. I started on Wednesday afternoon and am now just finishing up 4 days later. Windows 10 on Bootcamp just could not complete the setup procedure, ending up (one way or another) with a message that it was unable to modify the Boot configuration. I spent two days browsing the Internet for a solution (the problem seems to be not that rare), but none of the solutions offered (including recovering the Mac from the Internet - the Command + Option + R option) worked. I was resigned to take the Mac back to the repair shop while one of the last resorts - diskutil repairDisk disk0 - worked. It turned out the UEFI boot filesystem was corrupted. After diskutil fixed that, Windows 10 installed properly. 

The next step was to install the latest Windows 11 (24H2), which has some safeguards preventing it from running on Apple hardware (it requires a Trusted Platform Module - TPM - which is different from the T2 that Apple uses). Fortunately there are workarounds and the easiest is Rufus (currently v4.6 Beta), which disables the Windows 11 24H2 countermeasures. Rufus-based install went smoothly but when it ended, there were no Apple drivers present on the system so barely anything worked. Apple Bootcamp Assistant (on MacOS) allows to download the "Windows support software" to a flash drive, so once I fed that in, Windows was almost fully functional. Except that there was no trace of Bluetooth. This I finally solved by using "add a driver" option in one of the Windows dialogs and pointing it to the $WinPEDriver$ folder on the flash drive created by the MacOS Bootcamp Assistant. This has brought Bluetooth back and everything is working fine since then. I capture the steps here as they may be useful to other similar geeks who are in trouble and also for myself if I ever had to redo this procedure again. And oh there was also a support call to Microsoft to help me re-apply my purchased Windows 10 Pro license to the newly installed Windows 11. Yes it is 2024 and you need a voice telephone capable of generating DTMF tones!

So the lucky ending - except I now must get used to some new Windows 11 inventions like the obligatory horizontal task bar or all user data being stored by default in the \OneDrive\ folder.