4 ms·

Netboot Windows 11 with iSCSI and iPXE

194 points by terinjokes 2y ago

KaiserPro 2y ago
Hahaha, this is batshit, and I am here for it. I knew it was possible, as I'd seen some thin terminals doing something similar (using ephemeral filesystems though) However I've only ever done something like this for linux, rather than windows. Excellent work, I salute your skill.
- toredash 2y ago
  Next challenge: Wifi
MortyWaves 2y ago
> You probably want to remove the disks anyways so Windows doesn’t install its boot manager to an EFI System Partition on a local disk. To boot with iPXE later, you’ll want Windows to create an EFI System Partition on the iSCSI disk. ↩ Oh the frustrations I’ve had with Windows and more than one disk during install. For months I had Windows installed on SSD, except the bootloader was on a HDD. I didn’t even realise till I removed the HDD and got the familiar no boot drive found. Turns out if a drive has Windows on it, and then you decide to install Windows on a new drive, it will detect that bootloader on the old drive and use that. Instead of putting it on the drive you just asked it to install Windows to. Lesson learned here is always unplug any other drives when installing Windows!
- delta_p_delta_x 2y ago
  > always unplug any other drives when installing Windows! Many motherboards and enterprise notebooks have functionality to disable SATA/NVMe ports, so there's increasingly less need to faff with physically unplugging discs.
  - smittywerben 2y ago
    It's easy when SATA drives are stacked to unplug the ones you want. It's not easy when M.2 requires removing a heatsink to press the PCI-e unlock to extract the 2 ton GPU to access the primary M.2 slot underneath to use your screwdriver on the screw the size of a PopRock clinging on trying to not shake because it's holding onto the screwdriver with the magnetic force equivalent of a fridge magnet. Swapping the actual nvme drive out is easy. But then getting that screw back in is even worse than removing it. Sometimes you get lucky and the motherboard is improving the hotswapping capability with the newest yearly reimplementation of a screw with a string on it so if your screwdriver has trouble holding a fridge magnet against the gravity of the earth then the string keeps the screw from phase warping. My favorite has been the rubber peg designs but we're 10 years out from combining the peg with the string tech. That's when reading the manual to figure out the port numbers to disable in the BIOS makes sense. It just seems like missed opportunity they didn't make M.2 external facing.
    - delta_p_delta_x 2y ago
      I should've clarified: they include functionality to disable these ports directly in the UEFI firmware. No need to open up the enclosure at all.
      - fuzzfactor 2y ago
        Too bad my Lenovo lets me disable the SATA but not NvMe :( Plus I remember doing this for years under bios until some version of NT6 came along and Windows could access them even when disabled in BIOS on some mainboards.
- smittywerben 2y ago
  Whenever Windows self-repairs the bootloader it makes me want to learn DOS.
  - fuzzfactor 2y ago
    Learn the modern equivalent, the CMD console. You really want the Administrative Command Prompt for best functionality. However, remember if using Powershell instead it's still having trouble with the curly brackets so in every case they need to be quoted in commands, such as this example: Bcdedit /set "{default}" Description "Win11 23H2 on Dell 512gb SSD part 2" Which gives a much more useful description than the plain "Windows 11" that exists already on installations otherwise. Even though these "descriptions" never display until there are more than one choice on the bootmenu. Concentrate on the commands, BCDEDIT, BCDBOOT, and familiarize with DISKPART which opens its own sub-shell to handle drives. When you are done with Diskpart, you have to type "exit" to go back to the regular command line, Inbuilt Help docs for the regular command prompt are obtained the same old DOS way, for example "bcdedit /?". As an example, Bcdedit is too complex to learn from the Help messages, and there are hidden sub-help "chapters" which add to the confusion, so learn this one from the internet and its expert examples. OTOH Bcdboot is straightforward, but either way, to access a particular (naturally hidden) EFI folder (other than the one you are booted from at the time) on a chosen HDD or SSD you would first have to make the volume visible by giving it an alphabetic designator using Diskpart, the ASSIGN command. Under Diskpart, ASSIGN, "GPT ATTRIBUTES", SETID, ATTRIBUTES are 4 good ones to know even if you are not going to use Diskpart for partitioning. While in the Diskpart sub-shell, the inbuilt Help docs are accessed their own way, type "help assign" for instance to get Assign syntax examples. OTOH with the Attributes command, "Help Attributes" only tells you that you need to use "Help Attributes Volume" or "Help Attributes Disk" instead to get the examples you have in mind. A lot of this stuff I know already but I still use the help docs a lot to copy & paste the syntax examples from the CMD window into Notepad for editing before copying back to execute.
    - NikkiA 2y ago
      I type `bcdedit /set "{bootmgr}" path \EFI\refind\refind_x64.efi` so many times a year that it's probably getting close to time to buy a macro keyboard so I can set it up on a macro.
- fuzzfactor 2y ago
  With the latest W11 you get even more :\ When you install it to a system with other partitions or drives that are accessible, it silently autoencrypts them all using Bitlocker which is now on by default. It's not too bad unencrypting your C: volume afterward with a few clicks, but if you don't have a Microsoft Account then you won't have a readily available key (to type in) or easy decryption option for the other volumes. It can be a lot easier to reformat and recover those non-C: volumes from backup than bother to decrypt, you've got to virtually overwrite the entire drives anyway :( Simply installing the latest Windows is definitely more likely to be the direct cause for loss of more gigabytes than most malware I've seen. It didn't used to be this way.
  - kentonv 2y ago
    LOL they accidentally(?) created ransomware. "We've encrypted all your files. Want them back? You must sign up for a Microsoft account."
    - genewitch 2y ago
      I don't get the humor
  - kennysoona 2y ago
    > When you install it to a system with other partitions or drives that are accessible, it silently autoencrypts them all using Bitlocker Only NTFS/FAT drives, right?
    - fuzzfactor 2y ago
      As far as I know. I assign the standard Linux GUIDs on non-Windows volumes to be sure, as appropriate even though the regular "Basic Volume" GUID is often found since it works "for all". The standard Linux Partition_type_GUIDs as shown in Wikipedia (please refer to it) after expanding ("show") the condensed table: 4F68BCE3-E8CD-4DB1-96E7-FBCAF984B709 for the OS root 0FC63DAF-8483-4772-8E79-3D69D8477DE4 for data 8484680C-9521-48C6-9C11-B0720656F69E for usr 0657FD6D-A4AB-43C4-84E5-0933C84B4F4F for swap These can be SET ID from Windows, plus you can set GPT Attributes to hidden and/or readonly temporarily because it is getting more difficult to trust Windows so that's why I'm experimenting so much. Also you can safely change the ESP volume GUID from standard to basic, and Windows will most likely still boot normally on many PCs, you can then assign a volume letter to the ESP and after another reboot have full admin access to the ESP and its black pearl, the EFI folder within, from the GUI. Standard ESP C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B Basic Data EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7 Check my other extensive comment coming soon. :)
kentonv 2y ago
Hey Terin! Nice post! I also netboot Windows this way! To run a 20 machines in my house off the same base disk image, which we use for LAN parties. I have code and an extensive guide on GitHub: https://github.com/kentonv/lanparty https://github.com/kentonv/lanparty It looks like you actually figured out something I failed at, though: installing Windows directly over iSCSI from the start. I instead installed to a local device, and then transferred the disk image to the server. I knew that building a WinPE environment with the right network drivers would probably help here, but I got frustrated trying to use the WinPE tools, which seemed to require learning a lot of obscure CLI commands (ironically, being Windows...). You observed some slowness using Windows over the network. I did too, when I was doing it with 1G LAN, but I've found on 10G it pretty much feels the same as local. BTW, a frustrating thing: The Windows 10->11 updater also seemingly fails to include network drivers and so you can't just upgrade over iSCSI. I'm still stuck on Windows 10 so I'm going to have to reinstall everything from scratch sometime this year. Maybe I'll follow your guide to use WinPE this time.
- amazingamazing 2y ago
  I recently saw this and want to do something similar with just 4 machines to play relatively simple games (e.g. age of empires). I might follow what you have here directly, but am also considering just using a single machine with 4 vms. The big constraint for me is I don't want to buy a bunch of hardware.
- terinjokes 2y ago
  Hey Kenton! I figured you had done something similar with the LAN Party House. If I hadn't figured it out I was going to ask/look for your setup. > You observed some slowness using Windows over the network. Mini-ITX makes it a bit difficult to upgrade to 10GbE (only one PCIe slot!), and the slowness isn't bad enough in-game to deal with upgrading it just yet. > BTW, a frustrating thing: The Windows 10->11 updater also seemingly fails to include network drivers and so you can't just upgrade over iSCSI. I've read (and also observed, now) that if you install directly on iSCSI Windows doesn't make the recovery partition. This evidently also breaks 10->11 upgrades.
  - 2y ago
INTPenis 2y ago
In my experience booting VMs over iSCSI at home the network speed made it practically unusable. I'm happy Terin got Windows working though. Clearly it depends a lot on the network backend.
- nicman23 2y ago
  if you do not do rdma the latency kills everything from what i understand.
muhehe 2y ago
Instead of hiding which game it is, the company should be properly shamed.
- glitchc 2y ago
  There's more than one. I originally thought it was LoL, but then he mentions Steam at the end.
  - acgh213 2y ago
    if I had to guess from personal experience, Destiny 2 is in this exact situation. someone even patched out the checks and got it running and was still caught and banned permanently [1] it's a shame too because it ran on stadia for years before Google killed it and that ran Linux as it's main system. so there's clearly the ability. just a desire to prevent it at all levels [1] https://www.protondb.com/app/1085660#leulnGaiUV https://www.protondb.com/app/1085660#leulnGaiUV
curtisszmania 2y ago
Netbooting Windows11 with iSCSI and iPXE sounds like a game-changer for streamlining deployments.I've always been fascinated by how tech can transform operations.This approach feels like the equivalent of switching from dial-up to broadband.Imagine the time saved and the consistency achieved across systems.As someone deeply involved in HealthTech, the implications for secure, scalable environments in our sector are huge.It's not just about tech; it's about enabling innovation at a pace that was unimaginable a decade ago.Curious to see how this evolves and impacts our industry's landscape.Let's keep pushing the boundaries of what's possible.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ahepp 2y ago
I'm going to try this out later! Hopefully it works with a Unix iSCSI daemon. I have been doing this with a lot of my machines at home, and it's been awesome. Swapping what OS boots on what machine is as simple as symlinking a MAC address to a directory on my TFTP server. I wrote up some notes for doing this on Unix systems: https://ahepp.dev/2024/08/05/linux-without-hdds.html https://ahepp.dev/2024/08/05/linux-without-hdds.html Looking at it again now, it seems as though these instructions assume the system is being booted in a VM. It's not substantially more difficult to boot on real hardware, as long as you add the relevant network drivers to your initramfs and handle changes to any interface names.
tehcopec 2y ago
I ran a bunch of workstations with Windows 7 for many years this way, also using the predecessor of PrimoCache with local SSDs with a cache. I had an OpenSolaris server for the backing storage with ZFS/COMSTAR. I've been pretty much Linux only for the last ~15 years or so, but NVMe/TCP is so much faster. I would look at doing a secondary disk applications using NVMe/TCP once booted.
- mrspuratic 2y ago
  I used to netboot Windows 95 on a campus Novell network... you can probably work out how long ago that was ;) It started booting a 1.44MB floppy boot image of DOS 7 via (IIRC) BootWare boot ROM (pre-PXE) and switching to Windows using Joe Doupnik's installation method. In fact I was lucky enough to get Joe to help out in person on his way back from a nearby conference. Performance was not where it needed to be though, we switched to a netboot way of imaging Windows 95 onto the local disk -- actually 2 images, a "good" copy on a hidden partition that could quickly replace the live version when it hit cruft force 4 or thereabouts; and running (almost) everything else over the network. Fun fact: ~1200 PCs used to run an awk (gawk.exe v3.0) configuration script during boot.
  - tehcopec 2y ago
    Haha, that's awesome!
ratiolat 2y ago
Excellent job! How did you approach the licensing matter, as in order to customise Windows installation media and in order to be compliant with licensing terms one needs to solve (and pay for) this non-trivial puzzle if it can be solved in the first place: https://download.microsoft.com/download/3/d/4/3d42bdc2-6725-4b29-b75a-a5b04179958b/reimaging.pdf https://download.microsoft.com/download/3/d/4/3d42bdc2-6725-... ? I guess Microsoft has to make money somehow, but it's not funny. And the worst thing is that you somehow have to magically know this.
- terinjokes 2y ago
  You should speak with your lawyers for concerns about licensing. I'd note that the installation media was not modified (the DVD ISO provided by Microsoft was used unmodified), only the preinstallation media was modified (governed by ADK license). As an individual installing onto one machine already licensed, I'm not really worried here.
baumschubser 2y ago
OT, but for a moment I read that as netbook with Win 11 and got way more excited about that headline than I expected. I want netbooks back I think.

194 points by terinjokes 2y ago

Hahaha, this is batshit, and I am here for it. I knew it was possible, as I'd seen some thin terminals doing something similar (using ephemeral filesystems though) However I've only ever done something like this for linux, rather than windows. Excellent work, I salute your skill.

toredash 2y ago
Next challenge: Wifi

MortyWaves 2y ago

> You probably want to remove the disks anyways so Windows doesn’t install its boot manager to an EFI System Partition on a local disk. To boot with iPXE later, you’ll want Windows to create an EFI System Partition on the iSCSI disk. ↩ Oh the frustrations I’ve had with Windows and more than one disk during install. For months I had Windows installed on SSD, except the bootloader was on a HDD. I didn’t even realise till I removed the HDD and got the familiar no boot drive found. Turns out if a drive has Windows on it, and then you decide to install Windows on a new drive, it will detect that bootloader on the old drive and use that. Instead of putting it on the drive you just asked it to install Windows to. Lesson learned here is always unplug any other drives when installing Windows!

delta_p_delta_x 2y ago
> always unplug any other drives when installing Windows! Many motherboards and enterprise notebooks have functionality to disable SATA/NVMe ports, so there's increasingly less need to faff with physically unplugging discs.
- smittywerben 2y ago
  It's easy when SATA drives are stacked to unplug the ones you want. It's not easy when M.2 requires removing a heatsink to press the PCI-e unlock to extract the 2 ton GPU to access the primary M.2 slot underneath to use your screwdriver on the screw the size of a PopRock clinging on trying to not shake because it's holding onto the screwdriver with the magnetic force equivalent of a fridge magnet. Swapping the actual nvme drive out is easy. But then getting that screw back in is even worse than removing it. Sometimes you get lucky and the motherboard is improving the hotswapping capability with the newest yearly reimplementation of a screw with a string on it so if your screwdriver has trouble holding a fridge magnet against the gravity of the earth then the string keeps the screw from phase warping. My favorite has been the rubber peg designs but we're 10 years out from combining the peg with the string tech. That's when reading the manual to figure out the port numbers to disable in the BIOS makes sense. It just seems like missed opportunity they didn't make M.2 external facing.
  - delta_p_delta_x 2y ago
    I should've clarified: they include functionality to disable these ports directly in the UEFI firmware. No need to open up the enclosure at all.
    - fuzzfactor 2y ago
      Too bad my Lenovo lets me disable the SATA but not NvMe :( Plus I remember doing this for years under bios until some version of NT6 came along and Windows could access them even when disabled in BIOS on some mainboards.
smittywerben 2y ago
Whenever Windows self-repairs the bootloader it makes me want to learn DOS.
- fuzzfactor 2y ago
  Learn the modern equivalent, the CMD console. You really want the Administrative Command Prompt for best functionality. However, remember if using Powershell instead it's still having trouble with the curly brackets so in every case they need to be quoted in commands, such as this example: Bcdedit /set "{default}" Description "Win11 23H2 on Dell 512gb SSD part 2" Which gives a much more useful description than the plain "Windows 11" that exists already on installations otherwise. Even though these "descriptions" never display until there are more than one choice on the bootmenu. Concentrate on the commands, BCDEDIT, BCDBOOT, and familiarize with DISKPART which opens its own sub-shell to handle drives. When you are done with Diskpart, you have to type "exit" to go back to the regular command line, Inbuilt Help docs for the regular command prompt are obtained the same old DOS way, for example "bcdedit /?". As an example, Bcdedit is too complex to learn from the Help messages, and there are hidden sub-help "chapters" which add to the confusion, so learn this one from the internet and its expert examples. OTOH Bcdboot is straightforward, but either way, to access a particular (naturally hidden) EFI folder (other than the one you are booted from at the time) on a chosen HDD or SSD you would first have to make the volume visible by giving it an alphabetic designator using Diskpart, the ASSIGN command. Under Diskpart, ASSIGN, "GPT ATTRIBUTES", SETID, ATTRIBUTES are 4 good ones to know even if you are not going to use Diskpart for partitioning. While in the Diskpart sub-shell, the inbuilt Help docs are accessed their own way, type "help assign" for instance to get Assign syntax examples. OTOH with the Attributes command, "Help Attributes" only tells you that you need to use "Help Attributes Volume" or "Help Attributes Disk" instead to get the examples you have in mind. A lot of this stuff I know already but I still use the help docs a lot to copy & paste the syntax examples from the CMD window into Notepad for editing before copying back to execute.
  - NikkiA 2y ago
    I type `bcdedit /set "{bootmgr}" path \EFI\refind\refind_x64.efi` so many times a year that it's probably getting close to time to buy a macro keyboard so I can set it up on a macro.
fuzzfactor 2y ago
With the latest W11 you get even more :\ When you install it to a system with other partitions or drives that are accessible, it silently autoencrypts them all using Bitlocker which is now on by default. It's not too bad unencrypting your C: volume afterward with a few clicks, but if you don't have a Microsoft Account then you won't have a readily available key (to type in) or easy decryption option for the other volumes. It can be a lot easier to reformat and recover those non-C: volumes from backup than bother to decrypt, you've got to virtually overwrite the entire drives anyway :( Simply installing the latest Windows is definitely more likely to be the direct cause for loss of more gigabytes than most malware I've seen. It didn't used to be this way.
- kentonv 2y ago
  LOL they accidentally(?) created ransomware. "We've encrypted all your files. Want them back? You must sign up for a Microsoft account."
  - genewitch 2y ago
    I don't get the humor
- kennysoona 2y ago
  > When you install it to a system with other partitions or drives that are accessible, it silently autoencrypts them all using Bitlocker Only NTFS/FAT drives, right?
  - fuzzfactor 2y ago
    As far as I know. I assign the standard Linux GUIDs on non-Windows volumes to be sure, as appropriate even though the regular "Basic Volume" GUID is often found since it works "for all". The standard Linux Partition_type_GUIDs as shown in Wikipedia (please refer to it) after expanding ("show") the condensed table: 4F68BCE3-E8CD-4DB1-96E7-FBCAF984B709 for the OS root 0FC63DAF-8483-4772-8E79-3D69D8477DE4 for data 8484680C-9521-48C6-9C11-B0720656F69E for usr 0657FD6D-A4AB-43C4-84E5-0933C84B4F4F for swap These can be SET ID from Windows, plus you can set GPT Attributes to hidden and/or readonly temporarily because it is getting more difficult to trust Windows so that's why I'm experimenting so much. Also you can safely change the ESP volume GUID from standard to basic, and Windows will most likely still boot normally on many PCs, you can then assign a volume letter to the ESP and after another reboot have full admin access to the ESP and its black pearl, the EFI folder within, from the GUI. Standard ESP C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B Basic Data EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7 Check my other extensive comment coming soon. :)

kentonv 2y ago

Hey Terin! Nice post! I also netboot Windows this way! To run a 20 machines in my house off the same base disk image, which we use for LAN parties. I have code and an extensive guide on GitHub: https://github.com/kentonv/lanparty https://github.com/kentonv/lanparty It looks like you actually figured out something I failed at, though: installing Windows directly over iSCSI from the start. I instead installed to a local device, and then transferred the disk image to the server. I knew that building a WinPE environment with the right network drivers would probably help here, but I got frustrated trying to use the WinPE tools, which seemed to require learning a lot of obscure CLI commands (ironically, being Windows...). You observed some slowness using Windows over the network. I did too, when I was doing it with 1G LAN, but I've found on 10G it pretty much feels the same as local. BTW, a frustrating thing: The Windows 10->11 updater also seemingly fails to include network drivers and so you can't just upgrade over iSCSI. I'm still stuck on Windows 10 so I'm going to have to reinstall everything from scratch sometime this year. Maybe I'll follow your guide to use WinPE this time.

amazingamazing 2y ago
I recently saw this and want to do something similar with just 4 machines to play relatively simple games (e.g. age of empires). I might follow what you have here directly, but am also considering just using a single machine with 4 vms. The big constraint for me is I don't want to buy a bunch of hardware.
terinjokes 2y ago
Hey Kenton! I figured you had done something similar with the LAN Party House. If I hadn't figured it out I was going to ask/look for your setup. > You observed some slowness using Windows over the network. Mini-ITX makes it a bit difficult to upgrade to 10GbE (only one PCIe slot!), and the slowness isn't bad enough in-game to deal with upgrading it just yet. > BTW, a frustrating thing: The Windows 10->11 updater also seemingly fails to include network drivers and so you can't just upgrade over iSCSI. I've read (and also observed, now) that if you install directly on iSCSI Windows doesn't make the recovery partition. This evidently also breaks 10->11 upgrades.
- 2y ago

INTPenis 2y ago

In my experience booting VMs over iSCSI at home the network speed made it practically unusable. I'm happy Terin got Windows working though. Clearly it depends a lot on the network backend.

nicman23 2y ago
if you do not do rdma the latency kills everything from what i understand.

muhehe 2y ago

Instead of hiding which game it is, the company should be properly shamed.

glitchc 2y ago
There's more than one. I originally thought it was LoL, but then he mentions Steam at the end.
- acgh213 2y ago
  if I had to guess from personal experience, Destiny 2 is in this exact situation. someone even patched out the checks and got it running and was still caught and banned permanently [1] it's a shame too because it ran on stadia for years before Google killed it and that ran Linux as it's main system. so there's clearly the ability. just a desire to prevent it at all levels [1] https://www.protondb.com/app/1085660#leulnGaiUV https://www.protondb.com/app/1085660#leulnGaiUV

curtisszmania 2y ago

Netbooting Windows11 with iSCSI and iPXE sounds like a game-changer for streamlining deployments.I've always been fascinated by how tech can transform operations.This approach feels like the equivalent of switching from dial-up to broadband.Imagine the time saved and the consistency achieved across systems.As someone deeply involved in HealthTech, the implications for secure, scalable environments in our sector are huge.It's not just about tech; it's about enabling innovation at a pace that was unimaginable a decade ago.Curious to see how this evolves and impacts our industry's landscape.Let's keep pushing the boundaries of what's possible.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ahepp 2y ago

I'm going to try this out later! Hopefully it works with a Unix iSCSI daemon. I have been doing this with a lot of my machines at home, and it's been awesome. Swapping what OS boots on what machine is as simple as symlinking a MAC address to a directory on my TFTP server. I wrote up some notes for doing this on Unix systems: https://ahepp.dev/2024/08/05/linux-without-hdds.html https://ahepp.dev/2024/08/05/linux-without-hdds.html Looking at it again now, it seems as though these instructions assume the system is being booted in a VM. It's not substantially more difficult to boot on real hardware, as long as you add the relevant network drivers to your initramfs and handle changes to any interface names.

tehcopec 2y ago

I ran a bunch of workstations with Windows 7 for many years this way, also using the predecessor of PrimoCache with local SSDs with a cache. I had an OpenSolaris server for the backing storage with ZFS/COMSTAR. I've been pretty much Linux only for the last ~15 years or so, but NVMe/TCP is so much faster. I would look at doing a secondary disk applications using NVMe/TCP once booted.

mrspuratic 2y ago
I used to netboot Windows 95 on a campus Novell network... you can probably work out how long ago that was ;) It started booting a 1.44MB floppy boot image of DOS 7 via (IIRC) BootWare boot ROM (pre-PXE) and switching to Windows using Joe Doupnik's installation method. In fact I was lucky enough to get Joe to help out in person on his way back from a nearby conference. Performance was not where it needed to be though, we switched to a netboot way of imaging Windows 95 onto the local disk -- actually 2 images, a "good" copy on a hidden partition that could quickly replace the live version when it hit cruft force 4 or thereabouts; and running (almost) everything else over the network. Fun fact: ~1200 PCs used to run an awk (gawk.exe v3.0) configuration script during boot.
- tehcopec 2y ago
  Haha, that's awesome!

ratiolat 2y ago

Excellent job! How did you approach the licensing matter, as in order to customise Windows installation media and in order to be compliant with licensing terms one needs to solve (and pay for) this non-trivial puzzle if it can be solved in the first place: https://download.microsoft.com/download/3/d/4/3d42bdc2-6725-4b29-b75a-a5b04179958b/reimaging.pdf https://download.microsoft.com/download/3/d/4/3d42bdc2-6725-... ? I guess Microsoft has to make money somehow, but it's not funny. And the worst thing is that you somehow have to magically know this.

terinjokes 2y ago
You should speak with your lawyers for concerns about licensing. I'd note that the installation media was not modified (the DVD ISO provided by Microsoft was used unmodified), only the preinstallation media was modified (governed by ADK license). As an individual installing onto one machine already licensed, I'm not really worried here.

baumschubser 2y ago

OT, but for a moment I read that as netbook with Win 11 and got way more excited about that headline than I expected. I want netbooks back I think.