Installing Windows without Windows
You need Windows to install Windows.
If you want to know how I spent over 10 hours to simply install Windows on my laptop, this post is for you!
It all started pretty simple: I setup the PC on my desk, got a prepared bootstick with Windows 10 out and started installing the OS. Until: The media driver appeared! The installation process complained about a missing driver:
Retrying did not help — now what?
Check the forums!
Quickly checking the problem on Google gave the following suggestions:
- Try another USB drive
- Try a USB 2.0 drive/port
- Install the required drivers on an additional drive and install it from there during the OS installation process
- Just use the Media Creation Tool
(There are a few other, crazy ideas out there)
I ended up trying three different drives, tried to flash it with two different tools (dd and Etchar) and surely tried the USB 2.0 port as well. Without any luck.
Downloading the drivers also didn’t help me here and as I am a total noob to this topic, I ended up downloading drivers from Intel, AMD and Samsung in hope to get the nvme driver running. No luck!
Just use the Media Creation Tool
My only option left was the Media Creation Tool, which is a Windows application to either download the Windows ISO or flashing a USB drive. Apparently, you need Windows in order to install Windows.
My problem: I didn’t have Windows anywhere nearby. After all, the goal was to install Windows now!
So for one last time, I downloaded the ISO file from somewhere else to try to flash the USB drive again and then it struck me: There is a single file inside the ISO which exceeds the maximum file size of 4 GB on FAT32 formatted flash drives and thus the flash drive installation is incomplete. However, dd and Etchar did not complain or at least I didn’t notice. The whole time I thought the drive and the ISO itself are fine — I mean I tried different drives and they all ended up with the same problem.
What I tried now was some kind of Inception: I booted up my Ubuntu machine and installed Virtualbox. From there I took the following steps:
- Boot and install the Windows ISO inside the VM (if you visit the following page from a Linux distribution, you will have the chance to directly download the ISO: https://bit.ly/3y0FmEn)
- Install the Virtualbox Guest extensions to make the USB drive accessible to the Guest OS (Guide: https://bit.ly/2Tf5Va7)
- Install the Virtualbox Extension Pack to get access to USB 2.0 and 3.0 inside the Guest OS (Guide: https://bit.ly/3hiL4uJ). Otherwise, you won’t be able to use the drive.
- Mount the drive inside the Guest Windows
- And finally flash the drive with the Media Creation Tool
And it worked! The flash drive seems to hold all required files now and the OS installation wizard proceeded beyond my previous problem zone. I was finally able to actually install the OS on my laptop (and not just a VM on another machine)!
Conclusion
You actually need Windows to install Windows, or at least I did. Recent versions of Windows 10 exceed the maximum single file size of 4 GB and thus are not as easily put onto a bootable USB drive as previous versions. I got a version from 2019, which does not seem to have the file size problem, but unfortunately another.
I came up with the Virtualbox idea pretty late, but it worked like a charm. It was the first Windows-inside-Linux experience for me and after a few hiccups with the USB drive, it did exactly what I wanted surprisingly easily.
After all, you might only need half a Windows to install Windows ;-)
P.S: For all other distributions, I like Yumi a lot, especially to create multi-boot flash drives! (https://bit.ly/3hhgu4j)
Teaser-Image: https://pixabay.com/de/photos/mauer-fenster-ziegelmauer-3013323/
