Installing Windows, made easy, but harder again

Remember when you could just create a Windows installer USB stick and install Windows? Microsoft makes this trivially easy for Windows 11 and even recent older versions of Windows, and of course Windows Insider builds as well.

The problem

In current Windows Insider releases install.wim is now over 4GB, so it cannot be copied to the FAT32 partition needed to boot a USB stick. This isn’t a new problem, in the past you could work around it by breaking up install.wim into just the SKU of Windows that you require, but this is no longer the case.

The solution

There are two approaches:

1. Split your install.wim into multiple files by following this guide.

2. Format your USB stick into two partitions, a FAT32 boot partition and an exFAT data partition as described in this guide.

Update Windows 11 USB stick, maintaining the split between partitions

What you want to test different builds? I went with the option to format the USB stick into two partitions, and I can update the partitions using rclone (or you can use your favourite tool, of course).

• Download the ISO and mount it as (E:).
• Mount your USB stick.
• Update the files on the bootable partition (R:):

rclone sync E:\ R:\ --filter "- ei.cfg" --filter "+ sources/boot.wim" --filter "- sources/**" --progress -v --modify-window 2s --order-by size,mixed,75 --delete-before --transfers 4

• Update the install.wim partition (T:):

rclone sync E:\ T:\ --filter "- ei.cfg" --filter "+ sources/**" --filter "- *" --progress -v --modify-window 2s

Of course your paths may vary, use the appropriate paths for your system.