4 replies to this topic

[tstaddon]

Hi,

 

First of all, these tools are awesome, much respect to the developers and the community.

 

I've been using USB multiboot media for several years (a long time user of RMPREPUSB) but haven't done much with them for years; I used them quite a lot to provide XP-to-Win7 migration assistance and data recovery for family and friends. 

 

With the deadline for the free upgrade to Windows 10 coming up, I want a USB drive that can either allow me to restore people's machines back to their original Win7/8/8.1 recovery media or just install Win10 from the 1511 (Nov 2015) ISO. Can I just put that ISO into the Win10 folder without any modification or do I need to inject anything to the ISO/image for it, like USB3 drivers?

 

Also - I've never looked at the imgPTN option before so am a bit confused: should I be putting both media options on the drive, i.e. have a Win10_1511.iso and Win10_1511.imgPTN in the same folder?

 

Likewise, with Win7/8 factory recovery media in ISO format, is there any benefit to converting those ISOs to imgPTN or should I leave them as ISOs and put them in the OS folder? Or should they go in the PE folder?

 

Sorry, I know these questions are dumb but the last time I was doing this I was still pratting about with driver packs on XP builds and OEM SLP preservations during migrations in Vista/Win7; I'm quite rusty!

 

Thanks in advance

 

[Rootman]

You will need to use the .imgPTN so that the install can load the contents when booted via USB.   I use Easy2Boot and I have PE ISOs of 7, 8.1 and 10 in both 32 and 64 bit flavors as well as .imgPTN's of 7 and 10 install media.  Works like a charm is is very fast doing the installation.

 

.imgPTN is also the only way you can load up via UEFI if you want to go that route, else you are stuck booting the install media via real mode, which will not allow installation of Windows via UEFI.

[tstaddon]

Cheers.

 

I had all sorts of fun with a Lenovo laptop this afternoon which wouldn't boot at all from any device other than the built-in OS which was broken, and eventually I solved it with a BIOS flash and a Win10 install from DVD.

 

So I'm really trying to cover my bases; would you put the imgPTNs in the same folders as the corresponding ISOs?

 

<addendum> Sodding Windows does not like me copying >4gb files to USB drives unless I reboot into Safe Mode. Not sure what that's all about!

Edited by tstaddon, 13 May 2016 - 03:05 PM.

[tstaddon]

I must be doing something wrong; I can't seem get the Windows 10 ISO to boot as an .imgPTN file; E2B just tells me there's no menu option or something like that. Other .imgPTNs in the same folder work perfectly fine (for example Clonezilla).