Install from D Drive?

NavyLCDR said:

The diskpart commands take less than a minute to do.

Yes, and that's my preferred method (and I did say that you could do it this way). But some people are less comfortable using command prompt than you or I, the 'create a recovery drive' method can be used by anyone, regardless of technical skills.

Bree said:

Yes, and that's my preferred method. But some people are less comfortable using command prompt than you or I, the 'create a recovery drive' method can be used by anyone, regardless of technical skills.

It's just that a lot of people are making it sound like there is something special that has to be done to a flash drive to make it bootable, and that just isn't true. All that is required for both UEFI and legacy BIOS computers regarding the flash drive is a FAT32 primary partition marked as active. It is the files contained in the ISO file that make the flash drive bootable - not any secret, difficult or hidden code embedded on the flash drive.

swarfega said:

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

Bree said:

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).

These two posts, for example, make it sound like there is some magic trick to it. And there really is not.

NavyLCDR said:

These two posts, for example, make it sound like there is some magic trick to it. And there really is not.

Not a magic trick, but a genuine stumbling block for those without the necessary knowledge. USBs often come supplied ready-formatted without using a MBR. Such USBs cannot be marked Active in Disk Management, even if you reformat them. Only Diskpart can create an Active partiton.

Superfly said:

Actually one can clean install from a mounted ISO by running setup from the sources folder. It will create a windows.old as well.

But doesn't that only work when run from a WINPE environment? For example, let's say I want to dual boot Windows 10 Home and Pro. I have a full install of Windows 10 Home and an empty NTFS partition (or unallocated space) reserved for Windows 10 Pro. To my knowledge, I cannot run setup.exe from within Windows 10 Home to do a clean install of Windows 10 Pro to the space I have reserved for it. I can format the partition as NTFS, use DISM to apply the Windows 10 Pro image from install.wim to it, and use BCDBOOT to add it to the boot menu, but I don't think I can do the install with setup.exe without booting into a WINPE environment.

Hi,
@Superfly : Yes, that works just fine.

Using a USB drive you can make it bootable for BIOS and UEFI using Bcdedit, all else can easily be done using Diskmanagement.

Code:

bcdboot C:\Windows /s S: /f ALL

Replace S: with the drive letter of the USB drive.

Prior to using MR's Rescue media I often kept a few USB sticks that were made bootable like this to repair unbootabe Windows installs.

Cheers,

Superfly said:

Actually one can clean install from a mounted ISO by running setup from the sources folder. It will create a windows.old as well.

So are you saying I can mount the iso that's on my D Drive and install?

Deblk said:

So are you saying I can mount the iso that's on my D Drive and install?

What would you mount it with?

NavyLCDR said:

What would you mount it with?

Because I already have Windows 10 I can mount through explorer