Rufus 3.19 adds bypass for mandatory Windows 11 22H2 Microsoft Account requirement [Update]

Earlier this year in May, Microsoft made internet connectivity and Microsoft Account (MSA) mandatory for installing Windows 11 22H2 Insider builds. Thankfully, the OOBE\BYPASSNRO workaround, which we discovered earlier, still worked, and later, one of our forum members found a simple bypass trick to install Windows 11 22H2 via a local account.

Now Rufus has joined in too and with its latest pre-release version 3.19 Beta, a new option for bypassing the mandatory requirement for a Microsoft account (MSA) on Windows 11 22H2 has been added. This comes as a part of the new selection dialog for Windows 11 setup customization in Rufus.

Alongside the bypass for MSA, the new dialog also gets the option for the TPM and Secure Boot bypass which were added with a previous Rufus 3.18 Beta version.

Here is the changelog for the new Rufus 3.19 Beta which describes these new features:

Add a new selection dialog for Windows 11 setup customization:

• Secure Boot and TPM bypass have now been moved to this dialog
• Also allows to bypass the mandatory requirement for a Microsoft account with Windows 11 22H2
  (NB: Network MUST be temporarily disabled or unplugged for the local account creation to be proposed)

Rufus 3.19 Beta also has several other changes and improvements. You can find all of them here.

Update: The final version of Rufus 3.19 utility is available for download. The changelog remains mostly the same as Rufus 3.19 beta which means the Windows 11 22H2 MSA bypass is still present. However, the new release does add a feature for multi-extent file support when using Joliet specification (based on Unicode). The changelog says:

• Fix support for multiextent files when Joliet is in use

You can find the download link for Rufus 3.19 final version in this article here.