New
#11
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.
These two posts, for example, make it sound like there is some magic trick to it. And there really is not.
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.
Replace S: with the drive letter of the USB drive.Code:bcdboot C:\Windows /s S: /f ALL
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,