This post is for documentation purposes of this particular Windows 7 install method. I did the prep work from Windows 7 so some menu layouts may be different for newer versions of Windows. The drive should be formatted from within Windows itself. I do this with an external enclosure for ease of physically moving the drive from there to the target machine. Directions follows from here. Detailed information will be a section further down, labeled as Explanation. Right click on Computer, click Manage and then go to the Disk Management section under Storage. A new SSD/HDD will show up there to be initialized before any formatting can be done. This is where either MBR or GPT is chosen as the type. Select GPT and exit out of it when it asks anything else. In command prompt: Type diskpart and hit enter. list disk command to list available disks, you want the one under the Manage menu that is unallocated which will show its disk number. select disk X where X is the number list partition command to see if any partitions are present. In my case 1 was present which was created by making the disk GPT. The EFI partition was not there and I had to make one manually that became partition 2. In diskpart under the selected disk use this command: create partition EFI size=100 (this is in MB) make sure the EFI partition selected with list partition use this command: format quick fs=fat32 label="System" Command prompt is not necessary to leave open after that is done, but if you do anyway remember to type exit and hit enter so you are out of diskpart. In Manage menu for disks in Windows: Create a new volume with enough space for Windows installer files from the .ISO and format it using NTFS with the quick option box ticked. Assign this formatted volume a drive letter and copy over the installer files. After that is done this disk can be physically installed to the machine you want the OS installed on and boot the installer from the drive itself. At some point during the install it will say the order of the EFI partition is unusual and you can continue the install without further interruption. The remaining unallocated space will show and be selectable to install the OS on. Using this method required me to manually change boot order once the process started and under my systems UEFI, the installed OS was under "Windows boot manager". I used a SATA connection type SSD and the installation of my Win7 with the updates I chose took 5 minutes (including the reboot mid way) to desktop since it had the full read/write speed of the disk to use. Explanation I originally used a MBR version of this adapted from those pesky USB thumb drives. I had systems that would not recognize the USB no matter what formatting I gave it under the boot menus in BIOS/UEFI. So I decided to see if I could cut out the middle man that never worked and apply the install method directly to the SSD the OS was going to go on anyway. It worked without complaint or modification and didn't require more partitions or volumes. I tried to do the same for the more modern hardware while still ignoring the USB thumb drive option. My installer was made with SiMPLiX which properly integrated the necessary drivers (THANK YOU FOR YOUR WORK: Enthousiast and others for the tools and drivers!). I later opened that installer up with NTLite to configure services so there would be 1 less step for me to do later and that worked without issues. I have since learned these are registry entries that can be configured in the .bat when doing the initial DISM part of the ISO creation. However, I ran into a problem once actually at the install portion of the Win7 install. It said this install method is not supported on MBR. This lead to me changing over to GPT to appease the installer. I tried it again and a new error came up saying something about EFI. There was a click popup link thingy which should have given more information so I opened that. It was blank (total surprise with Windows documentation, right?). There is so little documentation on a bootable GPT partition but I did find something of value which was the need to create an EFI partition and some other partition. The other partition is created by default when selecting GPT under disk management. The EFI partition is not. This is also where the partitions are "out of expected order" message comes from when installing the OS. As for why it had to be done this way vs. the format and go MBR bootable disk method, I have no clue. There's multiple variables. I found a solution without bothering to care about those variables (1st ISO creation using Win10 files? 2nd edit with NTLite? My motherboards implementation of CSM? Not worth the energy.). The upside is this can likely be used with Win1X installs since this is compatible with the older Win7. Hopefully I did not miss anything. Nerve damage means everything hurts. Typing lots definitely hurts.