We picked up a cheap and cheerful Windows laptop for some work recently and it came with Windows 11 Home running in S Mode. S Mode for the unfamilar is a massivly locked down version of Windows that only lets you use software from the Microsoft Store, Presumably the S stands for secure although after a few hours trying to disable it we had other words in mind … To disable it is apprently easy according to Microsoft. However every time we tried this we encountered an error in the Microsoft Store saying:

“Something happened and we couldn’t start the upgrade”

Try as we might we kept coming up against this error and it seems from some online searching that we are by no means alone. The typical advise on the Microsoft forums was to run the wsreset.exe tool to clear out the store cache and try again, or variations on this. Otherwise the advise seems to be keep trying and sometimes a day or two later it might work. Some suggestions that disabling the UFEI secure boot would kick it out S Mode, however that didn’t do the trick for us although I think it may well be a required step in our final solution…

So from some research it would seem that S Mode is enabled through a registry key and simply editing this registry key is enough to disable or enable it. The one problem - you can’t run regedit from Windows when in S Mode. So we needed to work around this.

Firstly we disabled the secure boot, I don’t 100% know if this was required, but given we’d already done it by the time we solved things it’s worth repeating, but all means try without first!

  • Click the Start menu and select Settings
  • Click System
  • Click Recovery
  • Go down to Advanced startup and click Restart Now
  • Click Restart Now to confirm

The restarted machine will be on a blue screen with a few options:

  • Click Troubleshoot
  • Click Advanced options
  • Click UEFI Firmware Settings

This should load up your system BIOS settings where somewhere burried in them (sometimes only visible in an Advanced Mode) you should be able to disable the Secure Boot settings. Save that and restart.

We then go back through the above steps, but this time instead of clicking on UEFI Firmware Settings we click on Command Prompt. You should now have a command prompt on the screen. Type in regedit and press enter, this should load the Registry Editor. Now the only issue is that any changes we make here are not on the Windows system we want to make changes to, they will be to the Windows Recovery system we’re currenty booted into.

The registry has this concept of Hives which essentially are the different collections of settings, luckily for us we can load the Hive that contains the settings for our actual Windows system and the elusive key that enables/disables S Mode. To do this we need to:

  • Click on HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
  • File → Load Hive
  • Browse back to the C: drive browse to Windows\System32\config and select the SYSTEM file
  • Click Open
  • Give it a nice name, it doesn’t matter too much: myOfflineSystemHive
  • It should now load that Hive into the registry and you can expand it like any other node
  • Browse into ControlSet001 → CI → Policy
  • You should be able to see a key called SkuPolicyRequired which will be set to 1, edit it to be 0
  • Click back on your myOfflineSystemHive (or whatever you named it) node
  • File → Unload Hive, confirm the Hive should be unloaded.
  • Close the registry editor and close the command prompt
  • Click on Turn off your PC

Start the machine back up and hopefully S Mode will be disabled and you can actually do stuff with the machine!