Windows 11 Pro re-installation

debitcardmayhem

Is theold w11 still on the disk? You may try copying \Windows\system32\drivers and possibly ..\DriverStore to your usb

Peter999_2

Have you actually used Windows 11 disk management?    It is very simple to use and works fine.   I make changes to production servers all the time at work to increase/decrease windows partition sizes and have never once had a problem.

fwor

debitcardmayhem said:

Is theold w11 still on the disk? You may try copying \Windows\system32\drivers and possibly ..\DriverStore to your usb

Yes - I imaged it so that I could repeatedly trash it and just keep restoring back to the way it was when I received it.

The idea is good, but completely undermined by the utterly dumb (or possibly deliberately dumb) way that the Windows Setup program works.

You can't just point it at the top level of that directory and expect it to go away and search every subfolder (that would be really really difficult for a computer, wouldn't it?). Instead you manually have to navigate down to each individual driver .inf file and try each one - which of course MS reckon would be really really easy for a human operator to do? There will be thousands of drivers in \Windows\system32\drivers, and you have to try each one individually, because Setup doesn't tell you what driver it wants (nor how many drivers it wants).

fwor

Peter999_2 said:

Have you actually used Windows 11 disk management?    It is very simple to use and works fine.   I make changes to production servers all the time at work to increase/decrease windows partition sizes and have never once had a problem.

No - TBH I haven't, but that's not the difficult part. I'm not sure that Windows 11 disk management will allow you to change the size of the main data partition that it's running from, in real time, while it's mounted - but I haven't tried.

But GPARTED will let you do it without a problem. And having tried, Windows doesn't seem to get tooo upset if you resize its main NTFS partition and then move its Recovery partition to fill the gap.

I suspect that it would get very upset if you tried to insert other partitions in the gap between the two, but as long as you add the Linux partitions at the end it seems Ok. It flags the resized partition as needing to be scanned for errors, but that seems to sort itself out.

Peter999_2

fwor said:

Peter999_2 said:

Have you actually used Windows 11 disk management?    It is very simple to use and works fine.   I make changes to production servers all the time at work to increase/decrease windows partition sizes and have never once had a problem.

No - TBH I haven't, but that's not the difficult part. I'm not sure that Windows 11 disk management will allow you to change the size of the main data partition that it's running from, in real time, while it's mounted - but I haven't tried.

But GPARTED will let you do it without a problem. And having tried, Windows doesn't seem to get tooo upset if you resize its main NTFS partition and then move its Recovery partition to fill the gap.

I suspect that it would get very upset if you tried to insert other partitions in the gap between the two, but as long as you add the Linux partitions at the end it seems Ok. It flags the resized partition as needing to be scanned for errors, but that seems to sort itself out.

Like I say, I re-size partitions all the time including the Operating System partition using disk management.   I have also created dual boots many, many times with Win 11 (Linux, Chromebook OS etc).     In fact, I made a Chromebook dualboot today on a Lenovo x270.  Didn't take long at all and there were no problems.      What I would suggest though, is to use Macrium Reflect to take a backup before you start.   You can create the image while Win 11 is running without issues - just use a large USB hard drive.

fwor

Peter999_2 said:

Like I say, I re-size partitions all the time including the Operating System partition using disk management.   I have also created dual boots many, many times with Win 11 (Linux, Chromebook OS etc).     In fact, I made a Chromebook dualboot today on a Lenovo x270.  Didn't take long at all and there were no problems.      What I would suggest though, is to use Macrium Reflect to take a backup before you start.   You can create the image while Win 11 is running without issues - just use a large USB hard drive.

Thanks - agreed, I probably should try Disk Management, but I already know GPARTED well, so I'm less likely to make a stupid mistake with that!

And yes, I did take a backup image before I had done anything with the original. I'm used to using Clonezilla and Rescuezilla to make backup images, so I stuck with those. The latter is very simplistic, but it really does seem to work well. I've heard other recs for Macrium Reflect but it has a user interface that I don't know (yet - maybe I will need to know it in future).

As you say, the dual-boot install is easy - including the partition work it took me less than 15 mins to have Mint running. But of course you have to start with the Windows install first - Linux will play nicely with Windows, but Windows won't play nicely with Linux...

And... that still doesn't solve my original problem - I'm still having to use a copy of Win11 of unknown origin.

debitcardmayhem

fwor said:

debitcardmayhem said:

Is theold w11 still on the disk? You may try copying \Windows\system32\drivers and possibly ..\DriverStore to your usb

Yes - I imaged it so that I could repeatedly trash it and just keep restoring back to the way it was when I received it.

The idea is good, but completely undermined by the utterly dumb (or possibly deliberately dumb) way that the Windows Setup program works.

You can't just point it at the top level of that directory and expect it to go away and search every subfolder (that would be really really difficult for a computer, wouldn't it?). Instead you manually have to navigate down to each individual driver .inf file and try each one - which of course MS reckon would be really really easy for a human operator to do? There will be thousands of drivers in \Windows\system32\drivers, and you have to try each one individually, because Setup doesn't tell you what driver it wants (nor how many drivers it wants).

OK try copying any .sys .dll .inf files in windows\system32\drivers to  the sources dir on you iso usb without replacing any of course. Its worth a shot

Peter999_2

I've used Clonezilla before and it is pretty good isn't it.      I've used Macrium for a while now, and I'm sure like you once you get something working fine you are reluctant to change.

Good luck, and let us know how you get on.

fwor

debitcardmayhem said:

OK try copying any .sys .dll .inf files in windows\system32\drivers to  the sources dir on you iso usb without replacing any of course. Its worth a shot

Thanks for the suggestion - I started the existing copy of Win11, installed all of the Lenovo drivers, waited for Windows Update to complete all tasks and then copied the whole of the system32\drivers directory to a flash drive.

But... it still didn't find the drivers it wanted!

Unexpectedly, after I had done all of the driver updates on the shipped copy of Win11, Setup will now display the content of the existing Windows partitions, as locations to (possibly) find the drivers it needs. It did not do that previously, so I really don't understand where the Windows Setup program looks for drivers!

Ah well, perhaps life is too short to try to get through the deliberate MS obfuscation...

Olinda99

Not sure what you meant by shipped copy of windows 11 but in fact the original windows 11 did not have the drivers for the new Intel raid chips hence the reason you have to try and find them manually

what you could have done is downloaded the latest version of windows 11 version 22H2 they would have had the drivers in