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Comment by uyzstvqs | Hacker News Reader

What would be more interesting is installing Windows from a Linux live boot environment. It could actually be very useful to have a custom open-source Windows installer like that, with customization options and repositories with community-made mods.

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This is actually possible. There's Linux tools to extract the WIM files from a Windows installation iso. You have to create the appropriate partition setup (EFI partition with bootloader, NTFS partition with the extracted files), and for configuration of the bootloader I created https://github.com/U1F984/create_bcd/

Very nice implementation of a BCD creator. And in a language I can read, heh.

The only thing that's missing would be driver reflection. I always wanted to have a magic command to just reflect a driver from WinPE into an already-installed Windows, but that seemed to be handled directly by Windows Setup back when I looked at it.

I think you can do it with DISM nowadays though. So just make a trip through a WinPE on the way to starting for the first time and everything would probably work fine.

I would bet that FOG[1] probably handles all of this reliably already. Anyone wishing for a real devops-style workflow for Windows installation could also look at Glazier[2].

1: https://fogproject.org/ 2: https://github.com/google/glazier

The windows install process is actually pretty hackable despite not being open source. It largely boils down to extracting an OS image archive into a partition and installing the boot loader in another, all of which can be directed manually via CLI from the install media (shift+F10 if you want to do it manually). So the modifications are more or less: Do you want to customize the partitions? Do you want to tweak/replace the bootloader? Do you want to extract a custom image? Do you want to modify the image after to customize the install?

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