I screwed around with Ventoy for a while but couldn't get it to work for my use case. This was along with a slew of other USB booting solutions including (but not limited to) unetbootin, rufus, Sardu, lili, and yumi.
We have an obscure imaging program we licensed for our Windows fleet, and I wanted to do it along with a normal Windows 10 boot on one USB connected ssd. Finally got it working after days of research with just manually creating the partitions and putting them in the right order.
I'd lay out the part table, but I'm not at work...
*edit: I feel I should mention the imaging program is Windows based, maybe Windows PE (is that still a thing?). It does the spinning Windows 10 wait animation until booted.
PE exists as a 'lightweight' Windows environment and is basically what you are using as you install Windows from DVD/USB/ISO.
Under the bonnet there are also command line tools included in Windows such as DISM and WinImage and good old DiskPart that can be used to edit and dump a copy of the Windows OS (as a .wim file) onto a SSD/HDD and then boot it and let it auto-configure to the hardware.
I remember the day I've found Sardu, it was mind blowing, but they have this ridiculous thing about naming the ISOs and copying is really slow, now with Ventoy it's just work TM. We've come a long way.
Comments
I screwed around with Ventoy for a while but couldn't get it to work for my use case. This was along with a slew of other USB booting solutions including (but not limited to) unetbootin, rufus, Sardu, lili, and yumi.
We have an obscure imaging program we licensed for our Windows fleet, and I wanted to do it along with a normal Windows 10 boot on one USB connected ssd. Finally got it working after days of research with just manually creating the partitions and putting them in the right order.
I'd lay out the part table, but I'm not at work...
*edit: I feel I should mention the imaging program is Windows based, maybe Windows PE (is that still a thing?). It does the spinning Windows 10 wait animation until booted.
Seems to be. Latest release was 3 months ago, “Built from Windows 11 v21H2 code base.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Preinstallation_Envi...
PE exists as a 'lightweight' Windows environment and is basically what you are using as you install Windows from DVD/USB/ISO.
Under the bonnet there are also command line tools included in Windows such as DISM and WinImage and good old DiskPart that can be used to edit and dump a copy of the Windows OS (as a .wim file) onto a SSD/HDD and then boot it and let it auto-configure to the hardware.
I remember the day I've found Sardu, it was mind blowing, but they have this ridiculous thing about naming the ISOs and copying is really slow, now with Ventoy it's just work TM. We've come a long way.