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win-setup.md Raw

How to create Windows setup USB media from ISO

Primarily Windows 11.

Download the ISO

Download the Windows ISO from MSDN, with Media Creation Tool (burn to disc later) or visit this, select ISO, select language and go. Or, visit UUPDump (experimental).

Attach ISO

Right click on the ISO, open with Windows explorer and it will appear as a DVD drive.

Burn to USB

Prepare the disk to burn the Windows ISO on it.

Open an admin CMD, Powershell (Win+r, cmd, ctrl-shift-enter). Type diskpart and list disk. Select the pendrive (for example 1). select disk 1. Type clean, it will delete everything from it. Type create partition primary to create primary part. Type format quick fs=fat32 label=windows to format it.

wit this FAT32 method you can boot it on BIOS/legacy and UEFI compliant systems. Finaly type active and assign to assign letter to partition.

Burn the ISO

As the FAT32 filesystem allow a maximum of ~4,2 GB per file limit, we can not copy the entire Windows setup to the drive.

Select everything on the newly attached DVD drive in the first steps and copy all to the pendrive. Itt will do the job and throw an error that states can not copy install.wim. It is not a problem, split it to multiple files to bypass FAT32 size limit.

Open the DVD drive where ISO mounted, open sources, and copy the install.wim path by pressing CTRL-SHIFT-c on it or shift+rightclick and copy as path. Paste it into a notepad. Create a destination folder where we write the splited install.swm files and after them copy to the pendrive's sources folder.

If you're brave, simply use the sources folder on the pendrive. Create the folder and copy the folder path (as install.wim's) to the notepad.

Replace the source and SWMFile (destination) in this command. Dism /Split-Image /ImageFile:E:\sources\install.wim /SWMFile:F:\sources\install.swm /FileSize:3200

Open an elevated (administrator) CMD as in the diskpart step and paste the above dism command. It will produce install.swm, install2.swm and if you do not set the pendrive sources folder as destination, copy and paste the results. If the files appeared in the sources folder, job done.

Bypass Windows 11 system requirements

To bypass the system requirement checks, simply open the appraiserres.dll in the sources folder in notepad and remove all contents so produce and empty file (no, do not delete the file itself, only it's contents!).

Create local account and autounattend during setup

If you want to create a local user account, create an autounattend.xml file in the root of the pendrive directory and fill up (replace data if needed).

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<unattend xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:unattend">
  <settings pass="oobeSystem">
    <component language="neutral" name="Microsoft-Windows-Shell-Setup" processorArchitecture="amd64" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" versionScope="nonSxS" xmlns:wcm="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/State" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
      <UserAccounts>
        <LocalAccounts>
          <LocalAccount wcm:action="add">
            <Password>
              <PlainText>true</PlainText>
              <Value>myuserpassw0rd</Value>
            </Password>
            <DisplayName>My User</DisplayName>
            <Group>Administrators</Group>
            <Name>myuser</Name>
          </LocalAccount>
        </LocalAccounts>
      </UserAccounts>
    </component>
  </settings>
</unattend>

If you want your own autounattend.xml file, visit this link.

Bypass internet connection during setup

On the OOBE network screen

  1. Shift-F10
  2. start ms-cxh:localonly

old method

oobe\bypassnro when need to choose network.

If you want this, the best idea is to prefill the OOBE (Out Of The Box Experience) in autounattend.xml (see link above). The OOBE\bypassnro.cmd method is not work properly in the recent Win11 editions so better idea to use regular ways. Oh, and do not forget to disconnect the ethernet cable. However in regular situations it is not needed as the previous local user creation method will bypass the MS account for you.

Offline driver install

When you would like to install drivers offline from the manufactureer, simply run this command on the downloaded driver packs dir.

PNPUTIL /add-driver "D:\drivers" /subdirs /install 

Search for Lenovo SCCM Driver images, Dell Driver packs etc. Officialy it is only available for premium-graded notebooks or machines. If this pack not available for your device, you need to get manual driver INFs and others or search community maintained drivers.

When install with this method, can not use driver.exe setups which are usualy bloated with unneccessary softwares.

More tips coming soon...