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?
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/create-installat...
Windows iso these days can just be unpacked to a NTFS thumb drive.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
They're probably expecting exFAT instead?
Other option: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactu...
Other other option: https://rufus.ie/en/
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.
* 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.
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.
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.
I thought the post was saying to use NTFS for their drives normally, but I'm probably mistaken after thinking about it.