So, I have a Windows 10 Pro license lying around somewhere for a long time, and now it is finally more useful than registering a virtual machine.
I thought booting from a USB key should be out of question nowadays, well to some extend it was, but there were caveats.
FAT32 vs. NTFS
What the heck! Why is this still a problem, 10 year later the last time I had to deal with it.
Downloading a Windows 10 Pro ISO was lightning fast thanks to morden broadband; copying files into a USB key was amazingly fast too; however, there was this file (install.wim) bigger than 4GB, and of course that didn’t fit into FAT32 file system. I used a Mac to create the bootable USB key, so NTFS was not (easily) available.
The solution was pretty simply though. When doing this on Windows, one can follow this guide from Microsoft. When doing on Mac or Linux, one can use wimlib. I did it on a Mac, so it was something like wimlib-imagex split /Volumes/CCCOMA_X64FRE_EN-US_DV9/sources/install.wim /Volumes/WIN10/sources/install.swm 4000.
GTP vs. MBR
I created the bootable USB key using GPT partition table, because my hardware is new enough to support UEFI. Well it could boot the computer, and guide me through the installation process. However, after copying all files to disk and ready to reboot, an error message appeared saying something something wrong, which I don’t remember the details. I thought it was an one off problem, so I tried a few more times, but all of them failed at the same point. I should note that after partitioning, the installation process showed me a warning that the partitions didn’t match some sort of Windows 10 default partitioning style, but I double checked a few times, it was exactly like what the doc said.
Just before I almost threw the USB key out of my window, I thought about partition table, so I tried MBR instead of GPT when creating the bootable USB key. Guess what, it all worked out, and I still partitioned my disk using GPT partition table.
This is the thing I have not yet figured out why. But, as long as it worked.
No, I have not enabled secure boot.