What I Know About Windows

You’re a hard core Linux person, but now you have to interact with a commercial photo printing machine. Or you want to play MP3s in your 2013 car which has a USB port. What to do?

Delete all partitions, add one, set its type to b for "W95 FAT32" so it looks something like this.

I’m not sure how this irritatingly ubiquitous file system handles significantly larger volumes. Once you have the partition, here is a command that will format it such that it can be read by muggles' computers. (Turn on that physical RO switch obviously before doing that!)

Yes. This worked in my car.

Is it possible to install Windows 10 to a USB flash drive? Seems like it might be but it’s definitely not easy if you have to use an install image compatible with some kind of license server.

Maybe this helps?

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

Note that CDs are too small. Often 4GB USB flash drives are less than 1% too small. Burn the image to the DVD with wodim or cdrecord or some such thing.

Check the results…

This must be done to not hash the unwritten zeros at the end of the disk.

That tip comes from here which also reminds us that…

"Windows does not come with md5sum. You must download one from another location, preferably one that you trust." Facepalm.

Is this USB download thing from Microsoft useful?

Obviously since neolithic times, people have not used plastic discs to install anything. Although Microsoft stubbornly held on to the past, now its not just weird people who have no CDROM drive on hand.

I tried a lot of things like downloading the Windows 10 ISO from Microsoft and then using dd to put that on a flash drive. I don’t even know what that ISO is supposed to do but that strategy does not work.

Eventually I gave up trying to get a Microsoft approved installation USB prepared from Linux (come on, you’d think they’d at least help with that Linux task!). I then tried using Windows 7 but that seemed like a waste of time.

After hunting down a legitimate piece of the Windows 10 borg, I downloaded the Media Creation Tool 1809.

Running that, it took a long time (and probably a lot of bandwidth) until it died with some vague error (specifically "0x80042405"). Researching that, I found this thread which proposes the most idiotic ridiculous suggestion. And, of course, it worked. So here’s the right way to execute this process.

Looks like I’m no longer the only person in the world who would ever need to create a Windows install disk without having Windows. Check out WoeUSB.

Then get the Windows image. I had their download website say this idiotic thing: "This may take several minutes. Do not refresh the page or select back, doing so will cancel the request." After running all night, it didn’t progress. The answer was to not choose the latest version on offer but rather the older image.

Then try to run it with something like this.

Oh gosh. That dies with a grub error. Wonderful. Hang on a moment! It works anyway. Ok, so if this process mostly seems to write a big something to your USB drive but you get an error code on exit and some fuss about Grub, give it a try anyway.

Windows Pro Tip: When the install prompts you, do not give your wifi credentials. But telling the install process that you will have a network "later" you can get on with things but if you reveal you have a network, the "Skip" option disappears when it pushes you hard to cough up your phone number and email addresses. Add wifi once everything is up if you need it.

To simulate the Linux uptime command, try.

If you don’t know the "hostname" the net stats command will give you a hint.

It’s very frustrating when you have a ‘myfile.doc` and a myfile but you can’t tell them apart because Windows’ interface wants to lie to you every step of the way.

To show complete file names including extensions do this.

From a privileged cmd shell.

If that doesn’t work, try the following method.

It’s crazy but it does work. I am told that the GUI proxy settings under Windows change the settings for only the current logged-in user.

It seems that the Windows 7 (at least) installer can’t recognize USB3 ports. If your only keyboard option is USB and there are no USB2 ports you’re out of luck.

Here’s another possible solution.

You’re tyring to mount a Samba share and it finally works just fine. When you defined the network mapping and entered your credentials, you definitely clicked the box that said "remember credentials". Yet when you reboot, it needs the credentials again. Super annoying!

Here’s a web page with some answers. I haven’t tested these but it looks like the right place to start.

Here’s another, also untested.

Maybe a command line approach? Try net use /h for help.

I think the /p is for persistent.

These days Microsoft has pretty well cured the problem of Windows being inexcusably beyond terrible by including and integrating some obvious and ancient free software that Macs have been using since 2001 and competent computer professionals even longer. Windows 10 runs Bash using their Linux API which I blog about here. Tested! Works!

Decent notes on installing Windows Subsystem For Linux including a Debian distribution. Another howto link.

And to navigate out of their protective sandbox, you’ll want a path like this (for C:\): /mnt/c