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Modern PCs made in the last 5+ years or so come with EFI drivers to read NTFS partitions. FAT32 is not "needed for EFI boot". You can extract the ISO (e.g. with

Modern PCs made in the last 5+ years or so come with EFI drivers to read NTFS partitions. FAT32 is not "needed for EFI boot". You can extract the ISO (e.g. with 7z) onto a USB stick and you're done in most cases.

zamadatix 5y ago
The spec allows it but whether FAT32 needed depends solely on the board not the age. I've got plenty of recent boards that don't take NTFS/exFAT - I usually find out when I'm scratching my head as to why it doesn't show up in the boot menu.
satysin 5y ago
Some systems do indeed come with NTFS EFI support. However it isn’t a common thing. For example the new Microsoft Surface Studio Laptop I was using a few weeks ago does not support NTFS and the support documentation gives you instructions to create a FAT32 partition. This is why it’s fresh in my mind. Not a big deal, just annoying.
satysin 5y ago
Out of interest I did a little test this afternoon. Got a 128GB SanDisk USB flash drive. Used diskpart to clean the disk then created a single NTFS GPT partition. Extracted the current Windows 11 ISO they offer for download onto the drive using 7-Zip. Tried to boot on a Surface Studio Laptop, a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon from 2019 and an Alienware M15 from this year. Failed on all three. Just to be on safe side I used bootsect to ensure the USB is bootable but again failed to boot on all three. I then used the MS Media Creation Tool which happily creates a FAT32 formatted USB drive. This naturally boots fine on all systems. So while technically me saying FAT32 is needed for EFI is not correct the reality is FAT32 is what you can be [almost?] certain is supported on any system using EFI. Not even on Microsoft's brand new flagship laptop or a brand new, high end gaming laptop from Dell appear to have NTFS support in their EFI. I wish it were as simple as just extract the iso to an NTFS USB drive and boot.
- withinrafael 5y ago
  Thanks for that data. I personally haven't run into any unsupported machines but I have since learned Microsoft's own machine (the laptop you mentioned) doesn't have the EFI driver. That's quite sad. I'm going to make some noise about this in back channels.

zamadatix 5y ago

The spec allows it but whether FAT32 needed depends solely on the board not the age. I've got plenty of recent boards that don't take NTFS/exFAT - I usually find out when I'm scratching my head as to why it doesn't show up in the boot menu.

satysin 5y ago

Some systems do indeed come with NTFS EFI support. However it isn’t a common thing. For example the new Microsoft Surface Studio Laptop I was using a few weeks ago does not support NTFS and the support documentation gives you instructions to create a FAT32 partition. This is why it’s fresh in my mind. Not a big deal, just annoying.

satysin 5y ago

Out of interest I did a little test this afternoon. Got a 128GB SanDisk USB flash drive. Used diskpart to clean the disk then created a single NTFS GPT partition. Extracted the current Windows 11 ISO they offer for download onto the drive using 7-Zip. Tried to boot on a Surface Studio Laptop, a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon from 2019 and an Alienware M15 from this year. Failed on all three. Just to be on safe side I used bootsect to ensure the USB is bootable but again failed to boot on all three. I then used the MS Media Creation Tool which happily creates a FAT32 formatted USB drive. This naturally boots fine on all systems. So while technically me saying FAT32 is needed for EFI is not correct the reality is FAT32 is what you can be [almost?] certain is supported on any system using EFI. Not even on Microsoft's brand new flagship laptop or a brand new, high end gaming laptop from Dell appear to have NTFS support in their EFI. I wish it were as simple as just extract the iso to an NTFS USB drive and boot.

withinrafael 5y ago
Thanks for that data. I personally haven't run into any unsupported machines but I have since learned Microsoft's own machine (the laptop you mentioned) doesn't have the EFI driver. That's quite sad. I'm going to make some noise about this in back channels.