Fresh Win11 Install ... A blow by blow encounter?

TechnoMage2021 said:

I use an ISO that was pre-conditioned with Rufus, to eliminate most of the pain of the install.

TM

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That is what I ended up doing ... with my ethernet cable pulled just in case.

I have a kvm switch so I can jump between my Win 10 and Win 11 machine. Both on the same home network so copying some things like ShutDown icons between the two is easy.

Still some basic house keeping stuff to do (user folders) and then the fun really starts ... getting Win 11 to where I am with Win 10 (backups, rainmeter, aquacomputer info, etc, etc.

I now have Win 10 on one NVMe and Win 11 on another, separate NVMe. I can boot to either using the motherboard F11 boot option ... but I can't seem to get / repair the boot manager (bootrec / bcd) doesn't seem to do the trick.

Is there a 3rd party boot controller that is a) easy to use, b) understand, c) other?

what are you trying to do ?

I think he wants a boot menu, something like this

Yes ... dual boot menu. I googled a bit and found EasyBCD which I am going to try.

Edit / Update: EasyBCD worked like a dream. I ran it, clicked through some intro slides (not as many as MS Office) and it displayed some information about my boot situation (one on C, one on D). I then rebooted and have the blocky blue menu to choose from (pic above). I did change the default time out from 30 to 5 seconds.

RuffHi said:

Yes ... dual boot menu. I googled a bit and found EasyBCD which I am going to try.

Edit / Update: EasyBCD worked like a dream. I ran it, clicked through some intro slides (not as many as MS Office) and it displayed some information about my boot situation (one on C, one on D). I then rebooted and have the blocky blue menu to choose from (pic above). I did change the default time out from 30 to 5 seconds.

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Nice!

RuffHi said:

Thanks for the info.

I have a OneDrive account but the data structure has got away from me a bit ... ok, a lot. I am planning on using a Fresh Build of Win 11 to reset my data structure ... and then fold in my OneDrive account. The longer term plan is to dual boot Win 10 and 11 and have them both using the same OneDrive setup.

If I create a Win11 SM account (and associated OneDrive install, can I merge the Win 11 account with my existing account?

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With respect to OneDrive, I suggest keeping the OneDrive data on a separate drive or partition from an OS drive that you "might" image and restore with something like Macrium.

Take this example.

• You build your machine on monday, and you configure onedrive in c:\onedrive
• On tuesday, you are happy with how your machine is setup, so you take an image of the drive
• On Wednesday, you create some documentation about your setup and you save as C:\onedrive\Windows11Setup.txt. It's now saved on your local drive, and it's also synched up to the cloud.
• On thursday, you are playing with the registry, you make a change and your machine no longer boots. You try to fix it and eventually give up and go to bed, you will just restore your image from Tuesday in the morning....you feel you don't have much to lose.
• On Friday, you restore your image of your C:\ drive. So, your C:\onedrive folder is now empty because it was empty on Tuesday when you took the image. But you aren't concerned because your newly created files are in the Onedrive cloud, right?

So, what do you think happens

1. Your files are safely stored in the cloud and will appear in C:\onedrive once your computer sync's with the cloud as that's the newest copy of the file.
2. When OneDrive in the cloud sees your C:\onedrive folder is empty on your local machine, it's only assumption is that you intentionally deleted the files from C:\onedrive, and thus it removes it from the cloud and puts it into the recycle bin in OneDrive.

pparks - I have been seeing that very action happen while 'playing' with my OneDrive location. That said, OneDrive does provide a Recycle bin that holds 'deleted' files for a period of time. I have dive into that a little to recover some files. I can't say that it is particularly user friendly, but it seemed to work.

For the record, I have a 1TB NVMe drive dedicated to my OneDrive (O:\OneDrive). I will be using that location for OneDrive and for various 'special' folders (Desktop, Documents, Music, Pictures, Videos, etc). I also store my Acronis TIB backup files there (not too many) and they all get shunted to the cloud.

That said, I am running Win10 and Win11 on the same hardware (both installed to different NVMe drives) and I want both OSs to share various folders (Docs, Music, Pictures, etc). I don't want them to share the Desktop folder ... so I have Win10Desktop and Win11Desktop. I also have two versions of my Acronis backup folders (I will let you guess the names of those!).

So ... part of yesterday was spent

1. taking a copy of all of those special folders (to a different drive)
2. turning OneDrive sync off
3. setting up my OneDrive NVMe drive as above
4. disabling explorer
5. changing RegEdit entries for those special folders
6. turning explorer back on (thanks to Brink for those batch files )
7. rebooting
8. reviewing the damage / my work

RuffHi said:

pparks - I have been seeing that very action happen while 'playing' with my OneDrive location. That said, OneDrive does provide a Recycle bin that holds 'deleted' files for a period of time. I have dive into that a little to recover some files. I can't say that it is particularly user friendly, but it seemed to work.

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Yes, it does go to the online Recycle bin and you can pull it out.

In my example above, it was obvious and super easy as there was only 1 file and you would notice it missing. When it actually happened to me, I didn't notice the missing documentation for awhile. Fortunately, it was within the 90 day window that files are kept and I was able to restore my missing items easily, but it was confusing for awhile trying to figure out what happened to the stuff that I absolutely remember saving to my Documentation folder in OneDrive.

Someone called OneDrive a backup the other day. I don't think that is right. I treat it more as a sync method so that the same file is available to multiple PCs / people. I think you can use it as a backup, but you have to be careful with it (as you have noted).

Yeah, backup isn't quite the right word. Generally speaking, for somebody who just uses a computer (not an enthusiast who images and restores images regularly), OneDrive does provide the most basic functionality of a backup, having a copy of the file outside of your local computer so in the event that your computer is lost, stolen, broken, etc you don't lose your data.

And it's worth mentioning for those who haven't noticed this behavior, it's not "all" of the files in onedrive that end up in the Recycle Bin, it's only the files that you created/modified from the computer that you imaged between the time of the image and the restoration of the image that end up in the online recycle bin. Had you just reinstalled Windows to your PC instead of an image and setup OneDrive again, nothing would have changed at all. It would have been just as it was.

The only reason it bit me was that I have a couple of small Intel Nuc's, and a Beelink mini PC and I use them for playing and experimenting. So, I frequently change between Windows and Linux on those. Typically, I just run Macrium and grab an image before I install the other OS, so if I want to get back to where I was, I can pretty easily. Therefore, I simply moved these files to another drive or partition other than my C drive and only restore C when playing and experimenting and everything stays exactly as I would expect. And I wouldn't expect the average joe to be doing any of this.

RuffHi said:

Install complete (after a bunch of spinning circles and dots ... and reboots). Now for a bunch of MS hoops ...

1. Confirm country and
2. keyboard: ok
3. Check for Updates: didn't seem to find any because it moved on quickly
4. Name Device; ok
5. Set Up Option: Personal
6. MS Account: Do I have to? I want to keep rolling and add this detail later.

Time to google to see if I really, really have to.

Edit: That didn't take long ... How to Install Windows 11 Without a Microsoft Account

Answer: Turn off the internet connection.

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Just use Rufus, when creating the ISO with Rufus, check the local account option and add the name to your local account (check any of the other options that are relevant to you). There, no need to disconnect from the internet. It will log you in automatically and when you log off or restart/turn on your PC you will be forced to create a password. That's it

Clean-install time.