Rufus posts unsupported CPU bypass for Windows 11 24H2 in-place upgrade but not for everyone [Update]

Earlier this week, Microsoft reminded IT admins and sysadmins of the new policy for managed office and enterprise PCs that now allows them to have a feature update like Windows 11 24H2 as "optional". This was after the company released complete details about the 2024 update as well as the LTSC version.

Meanwhile, on the home users side of things, users with unsupported hardware are also trying to have a taste of the latest version of Windows and one of the popular tools that is useful in such a case is Rufus.

However, several users have been reporting that an in-place upgrade to Windows 11 24H2 is not working as the system requirements bypass fails. Pete Batard, the author of Rufus acknowledged the problem and provided a batch script that works around the issue. Batard also added that a future version of Rufus will have this script baked in.

He wrote:

For in-place upgrades, you need to run the following from an elevated command prompt before running setup.exe

reg.exe delete "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\CompatMarkers" /f 2>NUL
reg.exe delete "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Shared" /f 2>NUL
reg.exe delete "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\TargetVersionUpgradeExperienceIndicators" /f 2>NUL
reg.exe add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\HwReqChk" /f /v HwReqChkVars /t REG_MULTI_SZ /s , /d "SQ_SecureBootCapable=TRUE,SQ_SecureBootEnabled=TRUE,SQ_TpmVersion=2,SQ_RamMB=8192,"
reg.exe add "HKLM\SYSTEM\Setup\MoSetup" /f /v AllowUpgradesWithUnsupportedTPMOrCPU /t REG_DWORD /d 1

I'll add this batch script to the created media in a future version of Rufus.

...

It should fix the new restrictions for in-place upgrade if you manually run a batch script that will be placed at the same level as setup.exe and that will contain the registry commands posted above.

It will not change anything for clean install, since I haven't found breakage in the clean install bypasses while testing, meaning that if a clean install of 24H2 doesn't work with Rufus 4.5, then it also won't work with Rufus 4.6.

Aside from this, the Rufus developer was clearly annoyed about users on really old systems complaining that their PC was unable to bypass the requirements even after this script. He wrote:

Please take discussions of what CPUs are worthy to run Windows 11 somewhere else, or I will start deleting posts, as this thread is getting long enough already. These kind of discussions are squarely off-topic.

For those who may not have followed, Windows 11 24H2 only works on processors that come with PopCnt and SSE4.2 and thus no bypass method, app or software can help those on such ancient pieces of hardware. They can continue using Windows 11 23H2 though.

Update, October 7 2024: Rufus developer has again reiterated that the upcoming version of the utility will make it much easier to bypass Windows 11 24H2 requirements for in-place upgrades. An alpha version of the software has also been released for those who don't to wait for the upcoming version:

Note that, with the next release of Rufus, you'll simply be able to double click on setup.exe to perform in-place upgrades, as Rufus will create a setup.exe wrapper that applies the registry bypasses before running the original Microsoft setup.

If you are in a hurry to test this, you can just simply extract an ALPHA release of the upcoming Rufus from the MinGW artifacts available at https://github.com/pbatard/rufus/actions/runs/11201946687.

Update, October 11 2024: A pre-release version of Rufus is now out with the bypass and more fixes.

Update, October 21 2024: The final version of Rufus 4.6 with the bypass is available for download.