Windows 11 Install

According to what I read, I need to put Windows 11 installer on a thumb drive. I have never had any luck doing that. There has to be another way. Can anyone tell me how to do it other than using a thumb drive?

Thanks

Welcome to the forum

You can get an upgrade via the insider program and also you can run win 11 set up from a separate drive on you PC. for example you can have it on a separate storage device on your PC and run the set up.

You dont even have to put it on a separate drive/partition. Mount it where it has been downloaded, normally the download folder, and run the setup from there.

huffman said:

According to what I read, I need to put Windows 11 installer on a thumb drive. I have never had any luck doing that. There has to be another way. Can anyone tell me how to do it other than using a thumb drive?

Thanks

Click to expand...

Just skip step #8
https://www.elevenforum.com/t/how-anyone-can-get-windows-11.603/



You can use this tool, to see if your hardware is compatible with Windows 11...

https://github.com/rcmaehl/WhyNotWin11/releases

huffman said:

According to what I read, I need to put Windows 11 installer on a thumb drive. I have never had any luck doing that. There has to be another way. Can anyone tell me how to do it other than using a thumb drive?

Thanks

Click to expand...

Do you want to do a clean install or an upgrade?

If the latter, you can download an ISO, mount it as a virtual DVD (in Windows 10), and run the upgrade from that.

If you wish to do a clean install, that must be done from a bootable drive, typically thumb drive or DVD. If you'd like help with that, please provide your PC specs, especially the motherboard.

huffman, as was noted, you only need the thumb drive if you want to do a clean install since this will require booting from the installation media.

If you want to create a thumb drive, please try this method:

Download the attached ZIP file. Extract the one file in that ZIP file. Run it. There is no installation needed and it will not modify any system settings or create any registry entries.

NOTE: This program can do a lot more than create a bootable thumb drive. Some features require the Microsoft ADK to be installed. If you see a warning noting that the ADK should be installed, ignore it.

Follow these steps:

1) Run the program and choose option number 4.
2) You will be asked if you want to exclude an autounattend.xml if it exists. Respond with "yes".
3) You will be asked if you want to inject an ei.cfg. Respond with "no".
4) Enter the full path including the file name of your ISO image. You can paste this into the program.
5) Choose the option to WIPE the destination disk.
6) When asked if you want to create additional partitions, respond with "no"
7) A list of disks in the system will be displayed. Select the correct disk (your thumb drive).
8) You will be asked if you want to manually assign drive letters. Respond with "no".
9) You will asked to provide a volume label for the 2 partitions that this program will create on the thumb drive. Just hit ENTER to accept the default for both.

That's it. The thumb drive will be created. If it's a slow thumb drive it may take a while. Just allow it to run to completion.

You can get the iso and use Rufus to create a bootable thumb drive.

If you use a legacy bios (non UEFI) then select the MBR for partition scheme. However I am not aware of many systems able to install Win 11 on an MBR partition since most recent systems use the UEFI method so you probably won't need to change that.

Don't forget to disable secure boot in your bios. Some bios will require to create an admin password to be able to disable the secure boot option. you can create an admin password by using 1234 as password, disable secure boot, install and then re enable secure boot and remove master password.

There are ways of getting a clean install without booting from installation media, if you have a current OS. It is a lengthy process but can be done if you know how.

1. Create a partition for Windows 11.
2. Mount the ISO file for Windows 11 in your existing Windows OS.
3. Run setup.exe from the \sources folder from the mounted ISO file.
4. Install Windows 11 to the newly created partition.
5. Boot into Windows 11, use a program like Macrium Reflect Free to delete/resize partitions on the disk.