Well, straight up. It didn’t work. Windows 11 attempted to boot 3 times and kept giving me the old BSOD. I had only just noted the error message on its last boot with something about a boot device. Even though it went through the motions of trying to boot with the swirling circle near the bottom of the screen.
The last time I tried to boot externally it failed to boot at all with just a black screen and the PC’s fans going crazy.
At this point I was ready to give up. And then I remembered that the 512Gb with windows had been replaced with the 2Tb NVME, which left the 1Tb NVME (which I was using for Linux, EndeavourOS) and the 2Tb SATA SSD which still had a load of stuff on it.
So… With the 1Tb spare inside this PC I am now taking a direct image copy from the 51Gb NVME of Windows 11 to the 1Tb NVME. It’s still got some time to go before the copy is finished, so I will try that out then.
I am already assuming that this is pointless because booting externally with Windows 11 and this TPM thingy, that transferring over to another storage device will just make matters worse, and wouldn’t have worked anyway.
But, you never know. So later on I will try it.
If it doesn’t work then I haven’t lost a lot, only Windows 11, and gained 1.5Tb of space to use.
If it does work, then Windows 11 will stay on this PC and the other half of the 1Tb NVME will get a Debian Linux installed on it alongside Windows 11. And now and then I will boot into Windows 11 from time to time just to see what it looks like.