Just boot directly from the USB Flash Drive to Windows Setup. Do not format any partitions, delete them ALL to have all the hard disk space as unallocated. Then proceed and Windows Setup will create the appropriate partitions and continue installing Windows 10. When finished and inside Windows 10 you can then shrink the main partition if you need space for dual-boot with Linux or whatever.
Will it's just that yours is just about the only system that windows setup can't partition correctly. I have never seen another thread on here expressing the same issue with Windows setup itself. It's always been either a hardware issue or something the user was doing incorrectly. But, now I guess you have a claim to fame!
This should have been a slam-dunk" install and I can't see anything that I could do differently with this install media. I'm not a big fan of Windows, anyway, and things like this and the fact that it overwrites the Linux bootloader on a dual-boot machine just irritates me. There are workarounds for these issues but I shouldn't have to use alternative methods such as using gparted to create the partitions first (which I did on another machine - so I know it works) and installing Linux after installing Windows fixes the bootloader issue (the order shouldn't matter but you know Microsoft) or I could've edited the Windows bootloader to recognize other operating systems. The ONLY reason I purchased licenses is that my kids like to play FortNite - which won't run on Linux (not even with WINE). Otherwise, I wouldn't be using Windows at all.
That's another issue that I'll need to address. I want my User directory/folder to be on it's own partition and on a separate drive from the OS - similar to the /home partition on Linux. But that's not intuitive or provided as an option on the Windows installation media. And why should I use a thumbdrive in preference to a DVD? By the way, the latest Windows 10 download required a double layer DVD since the iso image exceeded the size of a single layer DVD. Good thing I still have a lot of blank DVD's including double layer ones.
No reason, just that I had mine on usb. The ISO and the USB made by the Media Creation Tool (MCT) contain identical install media.
If you use the MCT to make the ISO the 1809 media for x64 only is 3.82 GB (4,105,620,586 bytes) and will comfortably fit on a single layer DVD. This is because the MCT makes media with an install.esd file. If you make the ISO to include both x86 and x64 media it has always been the case for every version that it was too large for a single layer DVD.
If you used your Linux to go to the MS page for downloading Windows 10 you would not have seen any mention of the Media Creation Tool, instead you would have downloaded an ISO directly. This ISO would contain an install.wim rather than the more compact ESD form, it may well have been too large for a DVD.
Last edited by Bree; 30 Nov 2018 at 13:41.
A disk partitioning tool didn't help this time. It doesn't matter if I let the Windows 10 install media do the partitioning or use gparted, I keep getting a box that says that the efi partition is formatted NTFS. I guess I'll try with a copy of Windows 7 and see if I have better luck. If Windows 7 installs OK then I'll purchase another Windows 7 license. This should have been an easy process but it's not. For some reason my PC won't boot from a thumbdrive.
If you install any new operating system (not just Windows) it modifies the boot sector so it can be loaded. Windows just not care about non-MS OSes so they do not provide an option to select Linux by default. But this can be done either by editing the Windows Boot Loader with BCEDIT or a more user-friendly utility such as EasyBCD or EASYUEFI for UEFI installations. So you either edit the Windows Boot Loader to add an entry for Linux, or install Linux AFTER Windows 10 to use the Linux Boot Loader. You could also install Linux on a separate hard disk and make it default to boot into Linux. When you need Windows you just change the boot device with the F8, F12 (or whatever hotkey).
PS: If my main OS was Linux (no thanks...) and wanted to dual boot with Windows, I would shrink the Linux main partition to make space for Windows. Then install Windows to the unallocated space and let it create the appropriate partitions. This would boot into Windows but not Linux. Then I would either add an entry for Linux to Windows Boot Loader or boot with the Linux Live CD to restore the Linux Boot Loader (which hopefully would have an entry for Windows or I would add one). Of course the easier way is to install the second OS in a separate hard disk and select the respective boot device at startup.
I had to disconnect other drives to get this install to work - the other drives had efi partitions when I originally setup the system. Even though the other efi partitions were formatted as FAT32, they interfered with the Windows 10 install media.
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