Sketchy Seagull takes to the skies
Dec. 12th, 2018 03:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
roadrunnertwiceVICTORY!! I got Windows installed, got drivers and updates taken care of, got Steam installed, and managed to play like five or ten minutes of Hyper Light Drifter. At which point it was WAY past my bedtime.
What did I learn this time? I learned that it is ✨basically fucking impossible✨ to use a Mac or Linux system to turn a Windows ISO into a bootable USB installer drive. Give up. Do not try. Do not get clever. Ask a friend with a Windows box to do it for you.
I had a valid ISO! This should have been a cakewalk! But I spent all evening on it and failed A LOT.
- First I just
dded the UFS filesystem (which is supposed to be for CDs/DVDs) onto a flash drive, and apparently that is Rude, so the BIOS had no idea how to boot from that. - Then I tried using
unetbootinto create an install disk (since that's what finally worked for Ubuntu), but it created it as a Fat32 volume and then copied a 4.5 GBinstall.wimfile to it without thinking through the consequences (Fat32 has a hard maximum of 4GB per file), which corrupted that file enough to break everything. - Then I looked for other tools for creating an installer drive, and it looked like anything I could run on Linux (like
woeusb) was going to use Fat32 and run into the same issue. It sounded like if I ALREADY had a Windows machine, tho, I could usedismto split the oversizedinstall.wiminto chunks that would work on Fat32! But of course I did not have a Windows machine, and if I did, I'd have just done this the easy way in the first place. - Then I was like "I'll just copy everything to an NTFS partition," except MacOS can't create or write to NTFS! So I formated the flash drive as ExFAT, copied all the files to it, booted into Ubuntu, made an NTFS partition on the hard disk I was trying to install TO, copied the files to that, re-formatted the flash drive as NTFS, copied the files back over to it, and booted that up. THAT one failed in a super confusing way: it would boot into the install program, but then claim it didn't have a driver for my disk. (But I could go into a command line and run
diskpart, which could totally see and edit the disk, so wtf?) - Then I considered burning it to a DVD, because that's what my ISO was intended for in the first place, but it was too big for a single-layer disc (5+ GB), and I didn't have any blank dual-layer DVDs sitting around anymore, if I'd ever had any to begin with. (I somehow have like 50 single-layer ones, though.)
- Then I gave up and asked a friend to make a USB disk for me, which worked great! Eventually. (I had screwed up the partition record on the USB stick so badly by this point that I had to basically nuke it before Windows could even recognize it as a mountable device.)
But anyway! It's done!
BTW, Ruth was able to get me a really cheap copy of Windows from the employee store, thank u Ruth!! 😭 Taking everything into account, including the Car2Go trip for picking up the tower to begin with, I ended up spending $123 for a working gaming PC. AN ALL-AROUND SUCCESSFUL ENDEAVOR.
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Date: 2018-12-13 01:48 am (UTC)