TC-886-ER11 legacy boot

FnFrustrated

Hi All,

I've got a client who went out and bought two TC-886-ER11 desktop machines with the hope that they could upgrade their current hardware to newer systems (they're currently running old ThinkCentres). They have a ton of quickbooks and work order data that they need to keep in tact, and I'm trying to avoid building the new machines from the ground up. 

So I've imaged the drives from the Thinkcentres (as backups), with the idea of popping them in the new Acers and prepping them that way. I've done this a hundred times with different machines and no issues. Problem is, these OS drives are MBR. The BIOS (v. R01-A3) has an option to Launch CSM but this is greyed out. I've done everything suggested in other threads including the obvious disabling of secure boot (which can be done without a supervisor password being created), I also created a supervisor password to see if that would enable the option. I've tried RST with Optane, AHCI, literally every single thing I can think of, but I can never enable the Launch CSM option.

What kind of system doesn't offer the ability to boot to legacy, but sticks the ***** option in there! Anyone have an idea how to get legacy boot enabled? Or is this a hard stop because this BIOS doesn't offer the option at all?

billsey

I have to assume your clients are running Windows 7 on their old machines? That's the last OS that required a legacy boot environment. Do a system backup on the old machine after upgrading it to the latest Windows 10, the recover that backup to the new machine in it's UEFI environment. The disks will stay GPT and booting UEFI, but they will have the environment from the old machine. You'll then have to fix all the drivers, since none will be correct for the new hardware, but your applications should still be there...

I'd likely go the simpler route, install QB on the new machine using the same keys as with the old one, and migrate the data. I assume all the data is in QB rather than an external database or spreadsheet? When I move to a new machine with my company data that's what I always do.