Install from D Drive?

Hi...can I install Windows 10 from iso that I can mount from D Dive on my laptop to my C Drive or do I have to boot from disk?

I have the iso installed on my D Drive at the moment that's why i though i would check. Not sure if i can boot ftom usb on my laptop. Can I copy the iso to a usb drive and use it that way if I can boot from usb?

swarfega said:

No, you can't just copy the ISO, you have to use a program called Rufus to set up a bootable option.

You do not have to use a program called Rufus. You don't need any extra program at all to created a bootable USB flash drive from a Windows ISO, it's very easy to do within Windows itself.

@Deblk, In order to do a clean install of Windows, the computer must be booted from a Windows installation media. It can be a USB flash drive created from the ISO file, DVD, or a bootable partition on a second hard drive (either internal or external).

I used the media creation tool to download the iso onto my D Drive so can I just burn that to DVD to boot from? If I wanted to use a usb flash drive how do I create that from my iso on d drive? Thanks

I've used Mount and setup.exe to install Win10 as an Upgrade over an installed/running previous version. The key was that the .iso file was not stored on the C:/boot/system partition or was on a USB drive.

As Berton says, you can do an upgrade just by mounting the .iso and running Setup.exe from within your existing Windows. For a clean install you need to boot from the install media.

The simplest way to make USB bootable install media is, as Swarfega suggests, to run the media creation tool again, this time selecting the option to make a USB rather than the .iso.

How to make a bootable USB from your existing .iso depends on whether you want it to boot on a UEFI or a Legacy BIOS system. For both the USB must be formatted with Fat32, then just mount the .iso and copy all the files and folders to the USB. This is sufficient to boot on UEFI systems, but for Legacy BIOS systems the USB's partition must be marked Active. This can be tricky for most USBs as they don't have (or need) a MBR (master boot record).

The technical way to partition a USB, format to Fat32 and mark Active is to use Diskpart from a command prompt. The easy way to get the correct format is to first make the USB into a recovery drive, (type 'create recovery drive' in the Cortana/Search box). Untick 'include system files' - you don't need them because the next step is to delete all the files/folders on the recovery drive USB and replace them with the ones from your mounted .iso.

NavyLCDR said:

You do not have to use a program called Rufus. You don't need any extra program at all to created a bootable USB flash drive from a Windows ISO, it's very easy to do within Windows itself.

@Deblk, In order to do a clean install of Windows, the computer must be booted from a Windows installation media. It can be a USB flash drive created from the ISO file, DVD, or a bootable partition on a second hard drive (either internal or external).

I suppose that the "easy way" is to use Diskpart, though you don't say.

It's what I have always done. There are a couple of down sides:

1) It's a command line utility. Some are uncomfortable with that.

2) With a little carelessness, a wrong partition can be deleted.

@Bree,

Respectfully, you are making it more complicated than it needs to be. To create a Windows 10 USB flash drive for both UEFI and BIOS computers from a saved ISO file - insert an 8 GB or larger USB flash drive. Open a Command Prompt (admin) or Powershell (admin). Run:

diskpart
list disk
select disk # <-replace # with the drive number of the USB flash drive
clean <- this will erase the entire drive selected in the step above, make sure it is the USB flash drive!
create part pri
format fs=fat32 quick
active
assign
exit
exit

Then mount the ISO file and copy all the files and folders from the mounted ISO file to the USB flash drive.

That's it. The diskpart commands take less than a minute to do. How long it takes to copy the files and folders depends on the speed of the flash drive.

I can have the flash drive done before most people can enter the correct settings in the proper order in Rufus, and it is guaranteed to be configured to work in both UEFI computers and legacy BIOS computers as long as the computer has the capability to boot from a USB flash drive.

I believe you can also do all of the diskpart steps in Windows disk management, I'll try when I get home. You can definitely do them all in any decent partitioning program like MiniTool Partition Wizard or AEOMI Partition Assistant.