Like many of you, I have been seeing the press and blog posts about Windows 11, and thinking meh, its not for me, Windows 10 is fine. Of course, to be fair, I’m not a typical Windows user – my platform of choice is OpenSUSE Leap, with the fvwm window manager, which is basically insanely simple, and gets out of the way to let me use the command line, which is where I at most of the time anyway.
Windows for me is just a way of support Windows builds of my software for my users who prefer the Microsoft way. I have a copy of Windows 10 running inside a VirtualBox virtual machine, which actually works insanely well – windows installs very easily from the downloaded .iso file, apart from the idiotic way you need to avoid connecting the internet during the install process to get the ability to create a local login account. More on that later.
However, in Windows update, it reports that the hardware does not support Windows 11 – that is the virtual hardware, since the physical hardware was bought in the last 12 months, and is clearly modern enough. But that is coming. So, I just thought I could wait, and things will happen in due course.
Enter Minsky ticket 1352. Minsky, for some reason, triggers an assertion failure on Windows 11, even though it works perfectly well on Windows 10. So now, it has become imperative that I gain access to a working Windows 11 system. Since VirtualBox wasn’t considered acceptable hardware, because of the TPM requirement , I initially tried the low hanging fruit: an old 2017 laptop that used to belong to my son (hardware not acceptable for Windows 11); asking my son if any of his laptops were at Windows 11 (they weren’t). Then I tried VMWare, who have a free (as in beer) VMPlayer option, but even following the rules to add TPM and secure boot to VMPlayer, was to no avail. Frustratingly, Windows 11 does not tell you what is blocking it from installing, making it impossible to diagnose what else is needed.
So then I examined online which of my NUCs were supposedly capable of running Windows 11. My Gen 5, 2015 era NUCs were out for the count, but a replacement NUC I bought last year (Gen 11) was listed as compatible. Out of all the computers I have here at home, only one was compatible – the newest, which also was my main development machine, which I was reluctant to “put in the line of fire”.
It was time to get my hands dirty, having exhausted the simple options, apart from buying a cheap laptop with Windows 11 already installed on it. For me, that was a last resort, as once the bug was solved, it would go up on a shelf to gather dust until it becomes yet another item of our growing e-waste problem. I had already downloaded the Windows 11 install ISO, so let’s bung it on a USB stick and see if we can install it on a USB hard drive, of which I have a few. I took the precaution of removing the SSD with my precious Linux development environment. Windows doesn’t treat Linux formatted drives as unformatted drives like it used to, but I wasn’t taking any chances. I was half expecting it to not work on the USB drive, but instead I got “A media driver your computer needs is missing“, and a filebrowser to go looking for driver files. So off to Intel’s website, and download all the drivers for the NUC I could find. Drivers for graphics, drivers for wired ethernet, drivers for wifi – about five or six of them. Most were zip files, some were exe files, and one had a .cap extension. Pop them on the USB flash drive – and reboot again into the installer. Again the missing media driver message, and even though I could see the flash drive, none of the driver files were recognised. Not zip files, not exes, nor the .cap file. I unzipped the zip files, to discover they just contain more exes. So I still have no idea what media files Windows is looking for. And in any case, the Windows 11 installation instructions mention nothing about having to install any drivers until Windows is installed.
Yet more Googling and browsing StackOverflow. There were many, many complaints about the “media driver” error, which has been blighting Windows installs since at least Windows 7. Some people suggested that you cannot use the raw .iso file downloaded from Microsoft (like I’d done), but you need to use Windows Media creator. So you need to have Windows installed in order to install Windows! OK – even though the irony of that was not lost on me – I thought, I can do that. I rebooted my Linux box, fired up my Windows 10 virtual machine, downloaded Windows Media Creator, and clicked “generate iso image”, as I’m not sure that virtual passthrough USB drives work. Half an hour later, after Windows Media Creator had downloaded Windows 11 again, I had an ISO file, which I again copied onto the USB flash drive using dd.
Again – same result: A media driver your computer needs is missing” Frustrating as. Back to StackOverflow. Eventually, I came across this page. Buried in that page was the comment “TL;DR ** : Failed with Ubuntu and dd. Smooth ride with Windows and rufus.” So it seems in the Windows world “ISOs aint ISOs”, special magic is required to write them USB flash drives, unlike the Linux world, where you just write the ISO to the flash drive by copying the bits and use it. Rather than Rufus, I used Windows Media Creator on an old clunky laptop I had spare with Windows 10 on it, and chose the option to write directly to the flash drive. No more “media driver” error!
Now I got the message that Windows 11 will not install onto USB drives. The only option I had would be to install it onto an M2 SSD, as my NUC doesn’t have a SATA connector. I could either buy one (a 120GB M2 SSD is not expensive), but I’d need to wait 3 days for delivery. So instead, I had another dead laptop with a SATA drive in it. I swapped it into the Windows 10 laptop, and went through he same process as above (Windows Media Creator to create an installable flash drive with Windows 10), took out the SSD and then installed Windows 10 on the SATA drive. Well I had to do it twice, because I’d forgotten that you need to refuse to give wifi connection details ion order to have the option of creating a local account, but at the end of that process, I’d freed up a spare M2 SSD.
Installation of Windows 11 on the SSD on the new NUC now proceeded smoothly until the step where it asks for a network connection. This time, you cannot proceed without a network connection. What the? More googling, and I found a way of doing it. It turns out that Shift F10 is a magic escape sequence giving you a command prompt (rather like Linux’s Alt-Shift-F1), which allows you to run taskmgr. Use it to kill the process called “Network connection flow.” Magic! It drops you right into the same part of the Windows 10 install that allows you to create a local account.
With that, which took about two days, I was able to make short work of the Windows 11 bug, which coincidently turned out to be reproducible on Windows 10 too. But seriously, this is way harder than it has ever been to get Linux installed, even in the bad old days of Linux 0.9.x in the early ’90s.