Findings about Windows 10 Releases

LOL I have to admit I never actually checked out what "Rufus" is, I assumed it is just another GUI tool... which it is according to the screenshot on the website. I was just talking about a plain batch file you can run in cmd and does the job for you, setting up the drive with diskpart, making it bootable via bootsect.exe, and copying the files with robocopy. Done.

Nevertheless, everyone is free to choose the tool he or she wants. Rufus looks good and easy to use for the majority of people. The Microsoft tool sometimes didn't work for me, that's why I wrote my own script many years ago and just tweaked it now and then.

 

Now, you can insert via STRG+V

 

Unlike Rufus, WinSetupFromUSB lets you have several ISOs for multibooting on the USB drive. It can also boot in both BIOS and UEFI mode. Rufus have this feature disabled "to avoid confusion". I've never understood why Rufus is so popular.

 

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For all the guys who wants to make their external HDD or USB drives bootable, you don't need any programs, you just extract all the files of iso(just as they are) and mark the partition(of the external HDD or USB drive) where the iso contents are extracted as Active, that's it. You don't need to use any thing. I've been doing this since Windows 7 Preview days, heck I even swap between linux & windows iso(contents) as well(no need to use any tools to make it bootable).

To make a partition Active, either use Disk Management or Diskpart in Windows.

Edit: I installed my Windows 10 TP like this only.

 

Why swapping? That's just time consuming. Why not having all ISOs present at the same time?

All for the sake of not having to use a tool?

 

Yeah, you may not have Floppy in your config, but in the bios of VMWARE there is a Floppy Diskette is enabled, once you disable that the VMWARE guest won't detect any Floppy.


I don't know how much my post helps to all those having unknown floppy drive issues, but here is a thing, especially for VMWARE cases, if in your BIOS if any (floppy) Diskette is enbabled, then the OS detects the Floppy even if it is physically not present. This issue was common for all the latest Linux OSs(in Ubuntu it is there from something like 12.x, I don't know exact version), for CentOS or RedHat I found this issue from recently released version 7. Even in linux distros, it doesn't effect the working of OS drastically, but just at boot time it always tries to search for a boot sector/file on Diskettes(I think floppy diskettes are first in preference in boot order), which makes booting little slow & throws up an error in boot log(but boots fine).

I hope the linux solution(disable any diskettes in BIOS) does work in your cases as well.

 

There are two or three reasons mainly, 1) lack of space, 2) I try many different OSs that I don't have that much space to store all the contents of all the distros or OSs I try & 3) I rather use the free space, whatever left after putting iso contents, for normal use than storing the contents of all isos that I try(I'm already storing ISOs in some other place, then why would I waste disk space to store the contents of the same ISOs).

I never tried putting multiple ISOs in the same drive that I'm trying to boot from, I guess I should try it once & see how it goes.

 

Looking at the htmls of Cortana. It seems this little girl will be smarter in US than in the rest of the world.

 

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For now, yes. Cortana is still in beta and not globally available. Remember the old smart search in 8.1? It was only available in the US at first, but now it's globally available.

 

Alright. So I messed a bit with Cortana's settings in the Registry. Here what happens after restarting PC.

 

Right 100 points.
just let me add something:
This works as long as the drive is formated under vista and above.
With XP than you have to rename bootmgr to ntldr.

And by the way:
you only need boot folder.
sources: install.wim, boot.wim, setup.exe
in the root bootmgr(.efi) setup.exe

thats it, all other files are not needed for clean install (all others seem to belong to upgrade)
and yes its possible to strip down more, but who cares.

 

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placesserver.exe is also on cortanas folder and also the other cortana folder disapear at least for me (the 2014 one).

 

This is probably the most progress we've had as to enabling her so far

 

well my finding is the next build might be 9841.fbl_release.140927-1520 Professional according the event viewer error which is reported when trying to download the "new preview build"

 

interesting...