How to boot Windows from an internal Hard disk partition for installation?

Question

I would like to boot Windows 10 from a partition in my internal hard disk? I currently have Linux Live USB (Linux Mint 18 Xfce) through which I will be able to download Windows 10 ISO, but I need to mount it to the internal hard disk itself (since, I don't have a USB with capacity to store Windows 10 ISO) and boot from that partition. How to do this? I asked this question because I think it would be possible because laptops that come with firmware have the installation files in the internal harddisk itself, so it is possible to mount the Windows 10 ISO image to a partition and set the appropriate flags.

How can I do it?

What tools do I need and what is the method?

Solution

Since, I have Linux Mint Live USB (or any OS as Live USB), I have just downloaded the Windows bootable ISO from the Microsoft website (you can find links to it from windowsiso.net) and then I have right clicked on it and selected Mount, then the ISO is mounted to some location like /mnt/ABCXYZ in Linux. Then, I got all the files and folders in the ISO like efi,boot, and so on.

The aim here is to extract the contents of the ISO. So, you must get the folders and files in that ISO by any means. You can use any tool depending upon your OS.

Now, I created a small partition (10GB or so, formatted using NTFS) which should be enough for those ISO files to fit in. Now I copied all of those files to that partition and made sure that no other data exist in that partition.

Then I restarted my laptop, and then went to BIOS Settings (F2 key in my case) and then selected Add Boot Option, here we will get several partitions list, you must select that partition in which you have copied the ISO files.

(You can know the partitions by selecting them one by one, and hitting enter to see what files and directories that partition contains, in this way you will be able to identify which partition contains those bootable files.)

Now, you will be asked to select the Media file, here as we are talking of Windows 64-bit it is located in efi\boot\bootx64.efi. When you click on the partition in which you have the ISO files copied to, you will be listed of all the files and folders in that partition, now navigate to the above file.

<efi>
    |_<boot>
           |_bootx64.efi

efi and boot are directories. Every directory is enclosed with in <> atleast in my case.

Now, lastly give it a name like Windows 10 or whatever you want, just to identify it during setup.

Save the changes and then exit the BIOS (using Esc).

After restart, go to Boot Options (F12 key in my case) and then you will be listed Windows 10 (or some name which you have given previously) in boot devices. Select it and your setup should start.

So, in this way, we can create a bootable partition in internal hard drive itself and install Windows from there without the need of any external media like USB,DVD etc. The setup can also be faster here, because the files are transferred within the hard drive itself rather than from an external device.

Comments

[Blaine]

Well, you'd need some sort of bootloader installed to point to the partition. Not exactly sure how you could do this. Might be able to put grub on a small partition and see if it can detect your installation media partition and boot to it. As for making it bootable, I have no idea if this would work, but you could try using some tool intended for bootable USBs, and select the hdd. This is unlikely to work as most tools only detect removable media in that list. You might be able to get away with it if you use an external enclosure