Installing Windows 10
If, like us, you have downloaded the, you’ll be itching to try it. But how do you install it from the ISO you’ve just downloaded? Well, read on and find out. Historically, whether you copied Windows 98 to a directory on your C: drive from DOS called win98.src and installed from there, or created a USB boot of Windows 8 direct from the media’s installer, it’s possible to install the Windows OS from a number of mediums. So today, what we’re going to do is show you how to take an 8GB USB disk (4GB can be used for the 32bit edition), prep it for installing Windows 10, transferring the files to it and booting from it. While not a new process, we’ll try to cover as much as possible, just to give you a bit of flexibility when going through this process. First, let’s prep the USB pen.
For this, we’ve used a generic USB2 disk and are currently doing this on a Windows 8.1 Pro client. We're using the 64bit Technical Preview. Plug it in to your desktop/laptop and let’s get started!
Buy a new PC with Windows 10: If your PC came with Windows 10 installed, it likely has a license key embedded into its UEFI firmware. The manufacturer paid for a license and you can reinstall Windows 10 on the PC without entering the key. Windows 10’s installer will pull the key from a chip on the motherboard.
Oh, and be prepared to lose any data on the USB disk, so back it up first if necessary. • Open a command prompt window as an administrator • Click/press Start, type CMD, right click on the (likely) first result and choose Run as administrator • In the command prompt window, type diskpart and press enter • • Once at the diskpart command prompt, type list disk and press enter • You will see a DOS format table listing your available disks. Kerri Chandler Kaoz Theory Rarlab on this page. • Make sure you know what disk is the USB.
We know due to the size (7633MB) and that it’s not highlighted as a Gpt disk/partition. • At the diskpart command prompt, type select disk 2 and press enter • Replace our disk number with yours.
• At the diskpart command prompt, type clean and press enter. • At the diskpart command prompt, type create partition primary and press enter. • At the diskpart command prompt, type format fs=ntfs quick and press enter. • At the diskpart command prompt, type active and press enter.
• At the diskpart command prompt, type assign and press enter. • This assigns the next/first available drive letter for the USB disk. • At the diskpart command prompt, type list volume and press enter. • This is how you can confirm the drive letter assigned to the USB disk, in our case F • At the diskpart command prompt, type exit and press enter, but don’t exit the command prompt At this point we’ve prepped the USB disk for the Windows 10 files and folders.
But we need to copy the files to the USB disk. Depending on what OS you’re performing this on (XP, Vista, 7 or 8/8.1) the process will differ slightly.