Amber (my main desktop) was last upgraded in 2018. I had intended to stick with it for a few more years, even though it couldn’t be upgraded to Windows 11.
The reasons were many:
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Your system is MBR-partioned..
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Your system does not boot with UEFI.
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Your system is not subject to Secure Boot using TPM 2.0
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The AMD Ryzen 7 1700 CPU is not supported.
I suppose this could be seen as a blessing. However, one of the SATA ports on the motherboard went bad; it seemed only a matter of time before the rest of motherboard went the same way.
The foremost reason I use Windows is for Microsoft Money. If that didn’t work on Windows 11, I would have to seek some alternative. However, the Internet claimed Money worked on W11 (so, I’m not the only Money die-hard). I’d been delaying an upgrade on the Thinkpad X1 Carbon to W11, asI didn’t want two different Windows interfaces to deal with. However, I was going to have to do it sooner or later, so this was a good reason to do it sooner. The upgrade was painless and it proved that Microsoft Money does work on W11. Hoever, a lot of nice things in W10 are no more (e.g. vertical taskbar, ability to put personal shortcuts on the taskbar …). Old news now. Still, it’s worth it for the rounded window corners.
The upgrade
I upgraded amber with this hardware:
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Asus PRIME A620M-K Motherboard (Mini ATX)
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AMD Ryzen 5 8600G Processor with Radeon Graphics
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CORSAIR Vengeance 32GB DDR5 5200MHz CL40 AMD Expo Desktop Memory - Gray
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Crucial P3 Plus 1TB PCIe 4.0 3D NAND NVMe M.2 SSD
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GameMax TG3 Perfomance Thermal Paste
I planned to retain the existing SSDs (running Windows 10 and Debian 12 respectively) plus the two 1TB mirrored drives. There was a 500GB drive as well, used for Windows. This was replaced by the NVMe drive, which is going to be shared by Debian and Windows.
After checking that the mini-ATX form factor was actually mountable in the ATX case (the Internet said it was, but it never hurts to check), I fitted the CPU, cooler, memory and NVME drive to the motherboard while it rested on a (real) desktop. The cooler was a lot easier to fit than my last experience; no undue pressure on the screws to get them to bite was needed.
I swapped in the new motherboard for the old MSI Krait board and graphics card (a now utterly ancient ATI Radeon HD 4670).. Once all the power and ancillary cables were connected (but not the drives just yet), I powered on. Lights, noise… but no POST screen on the monitors. Bugger. I was going to reseat everything, when I remembered I hadn’t switched the monitors to the new inputs. Once done, the POST screen appeared. I powered off, connected the four SATA drives and rebooted. Debian booted directly; the mirrored drives were assembled correctly, screen extension worked in XCFE4 as did sound.
The Grub menu wouldn’t boot Windows (couldn’t find the boot drive), but I could boot via the BIOS boot menu (F8). The HDMI-connected monitor was not found. I had to download the AMD drivers to get it recognised (from [[https://www.amd.com/en/support/download/drivers.html][here]]). The significant hardware changes meant that Windows was no longer activated. I followed these instructions Reactivating Windows to legalise my copy of Windows 10.
And Windows Update offered me Windows 11! Now installed.
To fix the Grub Windows boot, I ran update-grub on Debian. However,
I still had a problem; see below.
BIOS modifications
Grub menu failed to boot Windows
Despite updating the Grub configuration, sometimes Grub couldn’t see the Windows boot drive. I realised the issue only occured on a cold boot. This is fixed by turning off FastBoot in the BIOS. (Boot > Boot Configuration > Fast Boot)
Power state on shutdown
The blue power light (and the USB-connected mouse light) were still
lit after a shutdown. The BIOS setting to fix this is Advanced > APM
Configuration> ErP Ready Enabled. Set to Enabled (S4 and S5). Note, S4
and S5 correspond to Hibernation and Shutdown respectively.
USB Hub configuration failure
I see this error on Debian boot:
amber kernel: hub 6-0:1.0: config failed, hub doesn't have any ports! (err -19)The Internet told me disable the USB device in the BIOS. I couldn’t find anything that matched hub 6, but there was a hub 5, Disabled that and the mouse and keyboard were no longer detected. Bugger again. To fix this, I plugged a keyboard into the PS/2 port and rebooted the machine via SSH. Glad the board still had that legacy port; I’m not sure how I would have dug myself out that hole otherwise. For now, I’m just going to ignore the error.
AMD GPU firmware
The message:
amber kernel: amdgpu 0000:0a:00.0: firmware: failed to load amdgpu/gc_11_0_1_mes_2.bin (-2)appeared on Debian boot. I downloaded gc_11_0_1_mes_2.bin from
here
and copied it to /lib/firmware/amdgpu. Still got the error
message. I removed the firmware blob file from this directory while I
considered what to do next.
Ah, a kernel upgrade reminded me about initramfs, since the rebuild
also complained about this firmware file. Copied gc_11_0_1_mes_2.bin
back to the firmware directory and executed sudo update-initramfs -u
to re-create. Update-initramfs gave no warning about about a missing
gc_11_0_1_mes_2.bin (plenty of other warnings, though). Rebooted and
the "failed to load" message has gone. Apart from the lack of error
message, can’t say I’ve noticed any improvement.
Crimson gets the cast-offs
The FreeBSD-based backup server, crimson, benefitted from the new ASUS motherboard, as it got the MSI Krait MB. The older power supply in crimson had a 20 pin main power plug (rather than the 24 pin socket in the MSI MB). In addition, the CPU power socket on the Krait board was 8 pin, but the power supply had two four pin adapters. I plugged one of these into the 8-pin socket (two wouldn’t fit). The AMD Radeon HD 4670 graphics card was transferred along with the MB. I also migrated the now unconnectable (not enough SATA ports) 500GB hard drive from amber to crimson. Can’t be used yet, as I need another MOLEX to SATA power adapter.
Despite power cables not matching, crimson booted and works quite
happily. The disks were arranged wrongly for crimson’s /etc/fstab,
but I shifted the SATA cables so that the FreeBSD SSD boot drive was
found first as /dev/ada0. Crimson is very speedy now.
