No. This will produce a fully fledged GUI Windows install. All this is doing is bypassing the GUI install in favor of manually partitioning + formatting the disks and applying the system image to the partition, then skipping the OOBE (Out of Box Experience) so it can be configured normally with just a standard local account.
Personally I would follow Microsoft's guide on partitioning [1] mostly, except the recovery partition which I skip creating. If Windows needs it they will auto create it again anyways in the next major update.
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:.
Microsoft actually has a guide for manual partitioning, which this guide does not follow. [1] The Microsoft guide cleans the whole disk and ensures the 100MB EFI partition is before the 16MB MSR partition.
I installed Windows recently and it didn't want to create a partition. Tried all kind of black magic (you can do a lot of stuff using the tools on the install media). Finally I copied the windows usb onto the hdd and booted from it, that did the trick.
You probably don't want to go down that rabbit hole. (trust me, I've done it, it is littered with footguns and sometimes incorrect documentation, and outdated advice. Lots of things are legacy, the docs are extensive but still only scratch the surface)
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.
Seconding that unattended Windows installs, or even just customized Windows install media, are a giant pain in the ass. It's kind of fun to explore once but the amount of effort required to get to something that works doesn't feel worth it by the time you get there.
I installed Windows 10 the other week - it kinda blew my mind how poor the install experience was.
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?
So, it does... but only if it's made using the media creation tool. ISOs or USBs made with MCT use the better compressed ESD format for the install archive. Only the direct ISO download uses the less-compressed WIM.
- 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.
But then you'd use the same method as installing other OS and people would realise installing a Linux distro is easy. Of course MS already made it much harder with secureboot and "accidentally" wiping Linux installs when you install it second.
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.
Meh, I don't have any love for windows, but IME newish versions seem quite well-behaved regarding Linux. Sure, they'll rewrite the UEFI boot order, but once you set it back to what you want, it leaves it alone.
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.
A friend of mine recently installed windows to another drive (I hadn't had the chance to tell him to unplug every other drive) and sure enough, it did install with all of the funny partitions elsewhere. We though it will be easily fixable afterwards, but it's not - you cannot recreate it. With those gone the system cannot hibernate and it couldn't shut down until disabling fast startup. Updates don't work either, but it still tries doing them, fails rollbacks and restarts. Is it user error? Maybe, but I still blame the installer for not being clear and automatically picking a stupid setup.
I made the same mistake recently, Windows now uses the EFI partition on the Linux drive. But I don't have any of the problems listed. Not shutting down seems more like some ACPI issue to me.
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.
I've had windows break my truecrypt disc. And this was recently.
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.
That only happened cause the disk appeared uninitialized to windows. Though I agree that it shouldn't touch any disks that aren't the install destination.
It's honestly behaving better than MBR since you don't need to boot a Linux liveUSB to fix the UEFI boot order. It requires some CMD commands but recovering (or heck, just installing) rEFInd is a rather painless affair compared to recovering a busted-up grub installation.
Windows 10 and 11 still breaks dual boot, had it happen with me in two different computers. Now I just have different computers with different OSes - had to get a second desk to be able to have all mounted in a way I don't need to swap computer cables.
When you for example upgrade from windows 10 to 11, if your partitions are a mess it will shrink your main C partition to make room for a recovery partition at the end
Doesn’t really justify putting it at the end on fresh installs, but I guess they put ease of future automated repartitioning first
Installing Windows 10 broke my existing Linux boot partition on a different drive (you can find many similar stories around the web). With the Linux drive unplugged, magically it works. Why would Windows ever touch a drive that I don't tell it to?
The title says arch and I remember trying to install it once and it's just like 'connect to wifi' and dumps me at the command line.
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.
There was a time when Linux distros tried to concur the desktop. For that they needed the normal user to re-install the OS. Windows never really had this challenge as Windows was and still is pre-installed.
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.
The image contains the various editions (Home, Pro, etc) but only one language. Doesn't make sense to me as a company will like use one edition but possibly various languages.
I tried installing it too, but oddly enough, it lacked drivers. Linux on the same machine runs flawlessly. I needed it for testing a new piece of software i am working on. I managed to install it after downloading a bunch of extras. Once installed it started downloading updates..and it went on and on and on. It’s such a low quality os it’s hilarious.
It's not a low quality OS in general; they just haven't really optimized the use case of people installing their OS from scratch.
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.
It's mind-boggling that we have utterly basic fallback standards for storage (ATA, USB Storage Class), display (VGA), USB (xHCI), webcams (USB UVC), mice/touchpads/touchscreens/keyboards (PS/2, USB HID) or Bluetooth, with BIOS usually providing emulation layers for everything of that excluding webcams and bluetooth so you can theoretically take any modern x86 PC and hand-write a basic OS in Assembler if you want and have all of that sorted out, but nothing equivalent for networking (both wired and wireless) to make bootstrapping less of a pain.
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.
It’s because all the wireless magic is in the dongle. I’m not entirely sure on the details but I think it just looks like a hub with potentially multiple hid attached to the host and bios etc have had rudimentary usb hid support for ages.
There are multiple networking standards in USB, for example. Almost every USB ethernet dongle is using one of the USB standards for networking. Obviously, Windows didnt support any of these until relatively recently. They were too busy trying to promote "their" standard (RNDIS) which as usual practically nothing supported other than PocketPC and ... early Android.
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.
> 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).
At least Windows comes with MTP support OOTB. macOS to this day doesn't.
https://github.com/WoeUSB/WoeUSB - you give it an MS iso and where to put it on a USB stick and it will do the job using NTFS, which doesn't have snags with >4GB files.
You can just copy the files, there is no need for tools to prepare boot media. UEFI will look for efi/boot/bootx64.efi file (on x64 arch) on your removable drive and boot that. There are no magic boot sectors anymore.
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.
I imagine that very few people who use Windows have USBs on fat32. In fact, Windows format by defaults on NTFS with the option format on exFAT. There is no option fo format on FAT32, you need to use a specific tool. More so, most people just burn the iso to the usb, deleting everyhing on it.
Windows ISO files are iso9660, so you cannot "burn them" into the usb; only to optical drive.
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.
He is wrong; UEFI does specify FAT (section 13.3). It does not prevent supporting other filesystems, as well as other partition schemes or volume formats (nothing prevents UEFI from supporting LVM, for example), but only FAT and GPT are mandatory (i.e. "must"). Thus only FAT and GPT are implemented in 100% of shipped computers.
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.
He frames it differently; more optimistic than the reality on the ground. He is also conflating things in a way that does not work (just because Intel ships something does not means that it is a standard to benchmark compliance to spec against it; it creates unnecessary confusion. Intel has a right to implement things above the spec, but it does not mean that spec mandates such things).
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.
> Most users are not going to disable SB for your snowflake of efi binary; especially if it is OS installer.
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.
That same page claims that disabling secure boot is no longer necessary (though most users are in fact used to it by now). It very much seems like the feature does actually just work in most cases.
And the only reason some UEFI implementsions support NTFS is as usual because of MS's monopoly. They don't have to specify it as the standard, it just becomes one.
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 is wrong; UEFI does specify FAT (section 13.3).
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.
Of course you can. I open rufus, and I "burn" the ISO to the USB drive. I don't know if you are referring to a more specific process, or a different process, but the ISO is then copied to the USB, and I can boot from it, install windows, and even browse the files.
Isn't it still a default somewhere? I recently formatted a pendrive on Windows and somehow mindlessly selected FAT (and ofc had troubles down the road). I probably picked a default somewhere. And to respond your question:
>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
>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
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.
The Win10/11 setup uses 640x480 resolution or such nonsense on my system with 4k monitor, RX6*** card, so I have a teeny-tiny view of the interactive elements. Gave me a good laugh each time.
At least in Germany all cheap USB sticks sold to average consumers in stores are still FAT32. I highly doubt they format different fs for different countries, the printing on the packaging indicates they're all sold EU-wide.
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.
That is strange - I thought windows Media creator utility automatically formats usb to exactly what it needs. Even if i put I. fat32 or ext4 stick it'll create a working install.
If you were supposed to use NTFS that's what the Media Creation tool would do. Instead it uses FAT32 and an image with superior compression (ESD). This is because FAT32 is the only required format for UEFI implementations to boot from.
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.
anecdotally - I feel windows has gone the opposite direction and switched places with linux in terms of ease of installation. I've been using Linux for decades now but had to install Windows 11 for a gaming machine I built:
* 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
I’ve learnt the hard way that it’s best to let Windows do whatever it wants on the entire drive or virtual machine. Anything out of the ordinary gets broken in the next update.
It's not always a question of cost. I can't stand windows for my day-to-day job, but I do need it from time to time. Yet, my work provided laptop can only take one internal drive, and there's no way I'll lug around USB drives.
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.
Just the other night I was looking at the way a Windows 10 install wrote the EFI partition to some random disk it was not installed on at all, and wishing for this, the GUI installer just does ridiculous shit and is really not up to par with even some no name Linux distro's Calamares. I have no idea why people buy this shit, it's Microsoft's luck that it comes preinstalled and most users never touch it
I found out that it did the same to me when I installed arch. Windows on one drive, EFI partition on a completely different one that has no reason to ever have an EFI partition.
Yeah, learnt that the hard way as well. "I'll install Windows on the new drive, copy over data from the old drive, then throw away the old drive - computer doesn't boot anymore because EFI boot partition randomly ended up on the old drive"
Since then, I always make sure to disconnect all drives except for the intended system drive when installing Windows.
I’ve had the Windows installer clobber the EFI partitions of Linux and macOS (hackintosh) installs on separate drives in the past, which is ridiculous. I now know to disconnect unrelated drives when installing Windows.
It cuts both ways. Most *nix installers will happily use the windows Efi partition and the only way to get it to use its own is to either deflag existing efi partitions or disconnect the drives
> 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.
I remember using TUI for Arch installation 10+ years ago. I think it also was named archinstall iso back then. But it had some limitations. I do prefer the way it is right now though, it seems rather simple.
They had a TUI installer which was just a rebranded `bsdinstall` from FreeBSD. They got rid of it around ~2009 IIRC because it was objectively bad and they moved away from doing releases. Nowadays they've added a new installer, and as far as people told me it's way better. I still install Arch the Arch way, of course, or rather, I haven't installed Arch since 2014, I've been `rsync`-ing stuff around for a while until 2017, and then `zfs send`-ing the same install over from one computer to another. It's faster and less annoying than setting everything up from scratch IMHO.
The installation is minimal because arch is a minimal developer effort distro. Think of arch as a bunch of devs making a distribution for themselves and if anyone else happens to use it, that's fine. It makes a lot of their decisions make a lot more sense.
The Arch install is literally
1. partition your system
2. mount /
3. run 1 command to actually install the system
4. install grub
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.
That's because Arch is not a consumer product. It is an enthusiast Linux project, perhaps a bit too hyped up, that is usually manually installed because that's the way it is.
> Imagine any other consumer product boasting about teaching you things, instead of just do what it means to do.
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.
You don't need to be taught again and again, you should just know it. I haven't had to install it in years but I bet I can get an usable system in 10 minutes.
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.
You can write your own installer script that will set things up exactly how you want to do it, which many others have done so before, if going through the manual process every installation is tedious.
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.
It sounds like you're the kind of person who wants a computer that "just works" with user-friendly point/click software out of the box.
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.
I guess I'm not the target audience either because all I did was use the archinstall script that comes with the ISO and had an arch installation on btrfs with KDE up and running in about 5 minutes tops.
And I did it 2005 with gentoo and scratch... it's unnecessary and you could have learned the same using ubuntu or whatever distro without debugging your system. But you are right as a noob it probably helps to do everything by hand at least once. The most annoying part about Arch is that if you look in forums, reddit or mailinglits a lot of users don't really learn to debug. They fuck up their system and install from scratch... so in the end a lot of them are really good at installing Arch but nothing else.
This is a pretty interesting perspective because my experience of using Arch for a decade is that the Arch forums are a great treasure trove of learning how to troubleshoot a Linux desktop. I also have never seen any prescribed advice of reinstalling from scratch and rather the recommended approach is booting a live image and chrooting into your system to actually fix what's broken when something truly is borked. This is also why there's such a hefty RTFM culture around the distro and avoiding going through the install without actually understanding what you're doing.
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
I've used Linux for more than 15 years now and my salary depends on how good I am with Linux.
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...
I don't even want to install Windows at all, yet M$ has made almost every business it's subordinate, where the businesses uncritically do what M$ demands of them while they pay M$ ungodly sums of money.
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.
Thanks for the article, just what I needed. I ran into a dreaded "Setup was unable to create a system partition" and couldn't find any solution, but with these steps, it worked!
The very best was for last... After all the files are in place but before the reboot (or even during setup if using offline media) remain offline until you've signed in.
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.
"""
I find it funny that the title is "the Arch Linux Way". I remember a time, as young man (in my 20s) when you couldn't reasonably expect a GUI installer for Linux. When Anaconda came out, that blew everybody's mind (at the time). It really depended on which distro-sphere you frequented as I know there were newer graphical installers that came before Anaconda, but were not as widely distributed.
This method is obviously exploratory and tongue-in-cheek but Titus has a great, more serious Windows 11 installation and configuration post and YouTube video here:
It is nice to know that there is still a simple-ish way to bypass linking your account to a Microsoft Account at install time.
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!
If you install Windows a lot, get yourself an answer file for unattended installs (you can generate one oneline). It turns all the clicking and typing into booting the ISO (potentially through Ventoy, which would allow you to pick between answer files), and waiting for the desktop to show up
This reminds me of a tool I built a number of years ago to do unattended installs of Windows over PXE, for an IT services company I worked for at the time. It completed much faster than using DVDs or thumb drives, and could serve many machines at once.
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