Install Windows the Arch Linux Way
christitus.com
christitus.com
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactu...
The iso contained files greater than 4GB, which breaks fat32, which I'm sure many people are still using on flash drives. So I had to use an MS cmd-line tool to split the wim files manually and edit the install files. Why doesn't the installer just use smaller archive files?
- you want to boot in legacy mode (and your machine supports CSM)
- your UEFI firmware supports NTFS (only mandatory filesystem is FAT32).
Otherwise, if you want generic, UEFI boot media, you would have to find out how to boot from FAT32 partition and once your system runs, how to run installer from another partition.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/create-installat...
Windows iso these days can just be unpacked to a NTFS thumb drive.
Given the massive updates you immediately have to download, and the heavy push for only installing with an online account, there seems little reason to have anything beyond a minimal net installer on the USB stick.
Microsoft taught me to be this cynical about their motives over a few decades.
The one thing I absolutely hate, is the recovery partition at the end of the main C: drive. So that if you want to grow the C drive, you have to jump through some ridiculous hoops to move the recovery partition. Had they put it the other way around, it wouldn't have been 0 pain. Even with a healthy dose of cynicism, I really don't know what purpose this could serve.
It's configurable through MDT.
My only problem is that BIOS updates delete the systemd-boot efistub, probably caused by the vendor only having exceptions for the Windows bootloader and GRUB.
Installed W10, after Fedora - Windows does a scanning and repairing drive and destroys a 1.5TB 60k hours drive with a full truecrypt disc encryption unrecoverable with the backed up TC headers. Annoying but not the end of the world. I've had issues with Windows installs in the past not knowing the file system on a drive and just using it. A reason which made me paranoid and I will always unplug drives I don't want used during a Windows install.
Doesn’t really justify putting it at the end on fresh installs, but I guess they put ease of future automated repartitioning first
I managed to figure it out by digging through documentation but the installation experience was extremely rough compared to every Windows version I can remember.
They're probably expecting exFAT instead?
I thought the post was saying to use NTFS for their drives normally, but I'm probably mistaken after thinking about it.
To ease the self installation quite a few nice innovations were made. One is a easy and beautiful install process. Also remember the LiveCD and not sure if related but the UnionFS was also a smart idea to support LiveCD deployments.
Every organisation, commercial or otherwise, has finite resources. And the vast majority of their users would probably prefer they spend those limited resources on fixing things with a higher impact on them.
This is the situation with the upcoming 13-inch AMD Framework, by the way: apparently the official Windows 11 installation image doesn’t include drivers for the AMD/Mediatek RZ616 Wi-Fi card (2021), so they’re going to have to tell people to use Rufus to inject one. Fedora reportedly works out of the box.
Every OS, no matter if Windows, Linux or BSD, needs to bring a crapload of drivers and binary firmware blobs with it, just to make sure networking works.
Whenever you wonder "why dont we have a standard interface for X" the answer is, inevitably, Microsoft. They frequently refuse to provide builtin drivers for standard interfaces and, whenever they do, usually as second class citizens, _even_ when it is their own standard (e.g. MTP).
You cannot even imagine how much the extremely poor support has completely shaped todays smartphone OSes (e.g. the duality in android between media storage and user storage coming from being forced to fallback on Mass Storage) and why everyone used to complain how difficult it is to transfer files from an Android to a PC using a cable.
At least Windows comes with MTP support OOTB. macOS to this day doesn't.
The issue is with filesystems recognized by UEFI firmwares. The only mandatory filesystem is FAT32. Some implementations (e.g. Intel systems) can read NTFS, but unless you are targeting such a system specifically, you get to use FAT32, period.
And here comes the issue with the Microsoft's ISO files: the install.wim file is larger than 4 GB. It is possible to split it into multiple wim files, or recompress into esd archive (which is what the Microsoft's tool does), thus fitting into FAT32 limit.
For USB, Microsoft provides media creation tool, which will format the usb to FAT32, and then copy the files there. As said elsewhere in this thread, it will use esd instead of wim container, which has better compression, so it will fit.
The install USB can be neither NTFS nor exFAT, because neither of these filesystems are recognized by UEFI (as mandatory filesystem, by UEFI spec; yes, some implementations can recognize NTFS, but as a system vendor, you cannot rely on that). So if you want to boot it on a all systems, FAT32 is it.
Yes, you can get Intel NUC and yes, it does support NTFS in UEFI. It is also compliant with UEFI (i.e. "can"). But is is completely useless, if you are shipping media, that should be bootable by 100% of UEFI-using machines. It is usefull, only when you are targeting such machines specifically.
You can ship your own filesystems, volume managers, device drivers... but they should be signed with a key trusted by Secure Boot, if you want them to be useful at all. Most users are not going to disable SB for your snowflake of efi binary; especially if it is OS installer.
As a result, nobody (nobody in Spolsky's sense) really bothers. When you are shipping bootable media, fat is good enough. It will boot your binary, do stuff it is supposed to do, and everybody goes on with their lives.
We have very different experiences, I must say. Mine is that Linux installers that do support Secure Boot are having to go out of their way to point that out to users because people are just disabling secure boot as step 0 by default.
Heck, NTFS is more commonly supported on UEFI implementstions than exFAT is, even when there is no free (as in gratis) implementation of the former, but there are several for the latter.
He literally addresses that. Saying that the one thing the Spec does is require that, at the very least, you can boot from FAT32.
When he says the spec doesn't require FAT32, he means nothing in the spec says your device itself should be FAT32 and that it's fully conformant to use a UEFI:NTFS driver to load from a USB stick.
Other option: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactu...
Other other option: https://rufus.ie/en/
Why on earth would you do that? People have been using exFAT for many years now.
>Why on earth would you do that? People have been using exFAT for many years now.
Most people have no idea what FAT is. If presented a choicee between FAT, exFAT, NTFS and ext4 I'm certain they don't care, don't understand the implication, and would just click a random option. Which is OK, not everyone should be a IT expert, it's MS job to make the experience smooth.
edit: and a technical reason: i think FAT32 is the only guaranteed fs supported by UEFI
I think it would be quite rare for someone who has no idea to even be presented with such a choice in the first place.
It's nearing twenty years since I stopped using fat32. I rather doubt that's a good assumption in the modern era.
FAT32 is still very dominant & I wonder why Microsoft & Apple don't push the vendors to use exFAT. Users unaware of filesystems won't need their stick being recognized by the UEFI, but they will have files > 4GB.
But you don't have to do all that. Use the Media Creation Tool:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows11/
Edit: Or even better, as degenerate comments below, use Rufus, which is what I use.
Some advanced tools, and I'd recommend looking at Ventoy over Rufus, use an intermediate loader to mitigate that. Others just let you assume the board supports NTFS boot.
* I couldn't install windows 11 because it was "missing drivers" (this took me back to 95) * Tried installing Windows 10 instead thinking to eventually upgrade to 11 * Got stuck in an update loop where it tried to install update named like 2H02 ~20 times (I wasn't paying attention to what it was actually updating and just kinda kept trying to update it until it was finished) * Tried to troubleshoot the issue, tried a few things * Gave up, installed ubuntu, checked how well the game works on Steam and it ran OK
Linux distribution try to make installation as easy as possible because most people need to install it themselves.
Microsoft not caring about installation because most people buy it preinstalled on their PC.
In fact, don't even set a _password_ initially. Change that AFTER the first boot so the installer doesn't interrogate for recovery information / etc.
""" Bypass OOBE
The Out of Box Experience is changing all the time. The requirement to be online or only use a Microsoft account. Bypass it with this command and using Shift+F10 to bring up the command prompt. NOTE: DISCONNECT FROM INTERNET before booting!
oobe\BypassNRO
System will restart after executing the command. Select Continue with limited Setup and name the device and create a local account. """
Then don't. You're simply not part of the target audience.
The Installation just sucks for no purpose. Actually it's worse than that they used to have a TUI installer but then removed it
Not sure what you're referring to here. Archinstall [1] is relatively recent [2]. I used it a few weeks ago to quickly yeet a machine into Arch for some testing. Worked flawlessly and had the machine from live boot -> Arch install on root media in under 5 minutes.
[1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Archinstall [2]: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Arch-Linux-Does-Archinstall
I have used the script and it pretty much lines up with the 'arch' way and I believe it is still a good introduction to linux.
Sure, it's a bit gatekeepy if you haven't done it before, but it teaches you a lot of useful things about how a Linux system works, that you'll undoubtedly need if you plan to use Arch.
Also am I dumb? Why do I need to be taught these things again and again every damn installation?
Plenty of consumer products does just this? Raspberry PI basically spawned an entire industry around this very idea. Bunch of analog musical instruments does the same, some even come with signal graphs and such to teach you the insides of the instrument.
I wouldn't mind a graphical installer but my point is that the install process reflects the experience of actually using it - it's a tinkerer's system, and from time to time you'll need to spend an hour reading the Wiki. If you're not willing to do it for the install, you'd probably also be miserable using the damn thing - the system is honest with what it is from the get go, and I don't think that's a bad thing.
There's even the (not so official) archinstall script built into the live ISO if you want a guided installation process.
But the core philosophy of the distro is that it targets users with a certain base-level of competence in working with Linux and provides them a simple, close to bleeding-edge distro; so it does do what it means to do.
You're absolutely not the target audience of Arch Linux, nor this "Arch-like" Windows install guide.
Personally, I learned more about modern Linux userspace by following the Arch install process (and subsequently maintaining an Arch install for daily-driver use) than I ever did from 5+ years of using Ubuntu desktop.
Arch has been the most stable desktop system I've ever used, but a lot of that stability comes from understanding exactly what is installed and configured, which is something I personally never got with Ubuntu or other fully configured distros
Although I agree you learn a lot with these distros, nowadays I just want something that works out of the box. If you spend years professionally bringing up Linux boxes, you don't want to it in your free time...
My workplace uses it, but I've been able to run a few small companies from Linux only. (One is very profitable, but its a medical company, its hard not to be profitable in Medical in the US. Two are barely profitable, the others are non-profits or havent launched yet.)
LibreOffice sucks, but it still does the job. I often use google docs/drive instead.
Everything else runs on Linux, my CAD, 3D printer, my video editing, AI Art. My workflow is easier/faster without dealing with forced Windows updates and having to sort my autosaves.
I think we are at the point, Linux can be a daily driver. I'm amazed to say this, for the last 15 years, I've been critical about how hard it is to maintain a linux distro. Today, I think its harder to manage a windows install, too many forced updates and malware/bloatware that are impossible to uninstall.
What makes this preferable to MS Office?
Hardware is much cheaper than time.
IME windows has worked well enough in a single-drive dual-boot config, even by evicting the original SecureBoot keys from the PC and replacing them with my own, with which I've also signed Windows' bootloader.
A couple of days ago I was reinstalling Windows on a machine that was new enough that the wireless drivers weren't available on install, and was surprised that the installer just would not let me proceed with the install like used to.
Of course, even if you manage to install Windows with a local-only account, that doesn't mean that it is going to be easy to keep it that way. At least you'll get to have your choice of username, though!
Since then, I always make sure to disconnect all drives except for the intended system drive when installing Windows.
Search for unattended install, autounattend.xml, Windows System Image Manager, Windows Imaging Toolkit. Don't try to install WSIM from windows store, as that version doesn't work. (this alone can save half a day of debugging phantom problems). There are extensive docs on the topic, but they are sometimes incorrect, contain incorrect code, etc.
You can start from here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/customize...
[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactu... [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/get-start... [2] https://www.ntlite.com/
> ass letter=c
Certain subcommands also support three letters, such as create partition primary:
> cre par pri
They are pretty hostile to their end-users.
Then I use WinNTSetup [2], just point it to where the Windows setup files are, and which partition is the boot partition (EFI partition) and which partition is to become C:.
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactu...