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RE:Booting Windows 7 isos on Ventoy usb 3 drive questions

windows 7 ventoy boot

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#1 Borg0Bot22

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Posted 28 June 2022 - 08:00 AM

Hello forum members,

I have a question (or few) for booting a windows 7 ISO from a Ventoy prepped USB 3 SSD..please take 'note' that i am a novice/noob when it comes to booting SSD with Ventoy ,Clover EFI or other USB boot managers in general ; How may i add windows 7 iso so that it will boot to the windows setup environment without errors(i have heard that running a Ventoy VHD plugin may work for a "VHD" version of windows setup iso but i am unsure how to do this procedure;also winsetupfromusb app has "IMDISK" ram-disk app capabilities that ventoy does NOT so i am even more confused... :unsure:...maybe it is not needed in Ventoy :wacko:??)

 

My PC has the following features to help fimd a solution to this external SSD boot drive dilemma:Gigabyte F2A88X

AMD chipset motherboard with AMD A8 APU...which seems to NOT recognize some of the PCI/PCIE cards(VIA 3.0 USB PCIe card,Protonix USB 2.0 PCI card) and other quirks...

 

I have had very good luck using the aforementioned Winsetupfromusb with any USB drives with less than 64 gb of storage space...but now am interested in using a new 12 TB SSD that came partitioned with six 2 TB partitions!!

 

Thanks in advance for any all helpful replies/comments!! :magic:



#2 alacran

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Posted 28 June 2022 - 11:09 AM

To start you can't boot from a Win7 ISO (or any other Win installation ISO), as if you were booting from a Win7 installed OS, to do that you need to boot from a VHD having the 7, 8.x, 10 or 11 OS (and required drivers) installed into it, the ISO is used only for installation purposes, additionally original Win7 ISO doesn't include USB 3.0 drivers, and it's not capable to run in UEFI Bios/firmwares v3.0 or newer, unless the Bios has an option to boot using CSM.

 

Now talking about install an OS running in Ventoy the installation ISO, Ventoy creates a virtual DVD device and loads the ISO file into it, and runs the installtion ISO, (similar as if running the ISO from Imdsk), but as Win7 lacks many new drivers, that approach will not work in newer hardware, easier thing you can do, (as I did), is create a Win10XPE and copy it to Ventoy partition, boot from Ventoy, run your Win10XPE and by means of WnNTSetup you can install Win 7, 8.x, 10 or 11.

 

NOTE-1: You can also use Make_WinPE by wimb to build your Win10 based WinPE, it makes easier to add additional drivers in \Make_WinPE_Trusted-44\Make_WinPE\Add_Drivers\10_x64 folder.

 

About the other devices you mentioned, well you need to test by yourself if your created Win10XPE is capable to recognize them, if not you will need to integrate the respective drivers (Win10 version) in your Win10XPE, of course if you are planning to install Win7 into one of those mentioned devices, you will need to also integrate the respective drivers (Win7 version) in your Win7 install.wim file, or even easier use the drivers integration feature (during installation) included in WinNTSetup, if not the OS will not boot.

 

NOTE-2: You will need also to include this plugins in Ventoy, to be able to boot from WinPE WIM and VHD files

 

Ventoy plugin to boot WIM files (Legacy BIOS + UEFI) and Ventoy plugin to boot VHD(x) files with Windows 7+ in it.

 

alacran







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