Help installing ... Windows 11

SPARC

SPARC

SPARC

Soldato
Joined
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Scotland
Not a problem I thought I would ever have ...

I don't have any Windows os systems in my house. I run Mint and Fedora. I'm brand new to Linux and so far it's been fine although I'm still learning a lot and have a lot to learn.
My mum has an issue with her laptop and since it was on W10 I thought I would update it to W11. The laptop is failing to boot so I've managed to grab some of the files she wanted to keep before I wipe and fresh install.

Problem is ...

How the f do I get this W11 iso onto a bootable USB drive?

So far I've tried Fedora Media Writer - This looked like it worked just fine but I can't boot from it. Then I tried BalenaEtcher - This gives me a warning before flashing that the media does not contain a partition table and sure enough it's not bootable. Then I tried Ventoy which was fun because I learned how to extract a tar.gz and run a .sh file from terminal. This was promising. Popped the iso onto the USB drive and it booted. Selected wimboot and bam, here we go. Woohoo! Success ... NOT!

uBk2jRE.jpeg


Why? I can't get passed this screen.

The only other thing which I can think of is running Rufus via Lutris but I don't even know if that will work.

I also tried Virtualbox with the same iso but I can't get the USB drive to attach to the VM. My thinking was to use Rufus in a VM but even though I Installed the Virtualbox extension pack it doesn't list my USB drive. The W11 iso installed just fine which is anoying.

Anyone got other ideas?

I'm starting to think I'm missing something really obvious but since I'm pretty green with Linux I have no idea. I'm going to keep reading and trying. If I had a windows machine it would be rufus and done.
 
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So I got Rufus almost working via Wine. It doesn't recognise any usb drives I plug in though.

It's changed days boys, I'm so far finding it impossible to install Windows. :cry:

Giving up for tonight because I'm out of ideas.
 
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aaronyuri said:
The partition table shouldn't affect the visibility of the drive, though. You should at least see the drive and be able to delete the existing partition(s) as GPT and MBR can coexist just fine.

@op you can enter command prompt using Shift-F10 during Windows setup, then run diskpart and list disk to see if any drives are detected. If the list is blank, then you're short of a driver. You can find the driver required and slipstream it into the install, manually copy it to the USB, or connect another external device and install it that way.
Click to expand...

Thanks lads. I'm back at it again with Ventoy since it got me the furthest.

I've done shift-F10 diskpart and list disk which is showing me Disk 0 online 238GB and Disk 1 online 58GB (this is obv my USB drive)

So it can see the drives.

Is there no Rufus alternative for Linux becuase I heavily suspect it's just like @deviation has said.

If there is no alternative then I'm going to have to speak to one of our IT staff at work tomorrow and ask if I can borrow their machine to use Rufus. I'm sure if I explain what I'm doing they will understand. They all seem like a nice bunch of guys anyway.

Imagine in 2025 we still don't have a live Windows we can run and install.

What a pain in the arse!
 
Also, I'm sorry to have dirtied the Linux area with my Windows chat but it's because I don't have Windows that this has happened.
 
Yup, BalenaEtcher, Fedora Media Writer and the one which comes with Mint, Image writer I think it's called.
At least BalenaEtcher said to me "This probably wont work" so I give it that.
Ventoy at least got me as far as the screen above.
 
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