I just realized that the April 2026 Windows 11 Consumer 25H2 ISOs have increased in size and no longer fit 8GB USB drives. Are 16GB USB drives the minimum required now or is there a way around this?
You're right! I didn't notice that the Win11_25H2_English_x64_v2.iso was 8,273,050 KB. I'll bet someone will shrink it down but I prefer to use the stock Microsoft Image. I bought a 5 pack of 16 GB USB 3 sticks off Amazon just before all the AI craziness drove any memory device prices crazy. I cringe at what RAM, M.2 SSDs, etc. cost these days. I actually bid on a refurbished Dell PC on an auction site just to get the DDR4 RAM and M.2 NVME Drive. I was the top bidder with less than a minute left but 2 guys jumped in and bid it up to double my max bid.
I used https://forums.mydigitallife.net/threads/win-iso-wim-esd-swm-handling-tool.78925/ with en-us_windows_11_consumer_editions_version_25h2_updated_may_2026_x64_dvd_ceef8999.iso. I selected one index and ESD File - Smaller install file (longer creation). I got a [WARNING] Couldn't create parallel chunk compressor: Ran out of memory. Falling back to single-threaded compression. Resulted ISO was just above 6GB. I did not try the ISO to perform an installation.
Why are you now putting this in an unrelated thread? Your error is not usual, it is something related to your hardware/situation, i showed it working fine..
Actually, if you check the time, you will see that I first replied to this thread and then to the other thread, as I realized that it was also related with that.
The Box was originally built in November 2021 on a Asus Pro B460M-C Motherboard. With an Intel CPU 4.10 gigahertz Intel Pentium Gold G6405 128 kilobyte primary memory cache 512 kilobyte secondary memory cache 4 megabyte tertiary memory cache 64-bit ready Multi-core (2 total) Hyper-threaded (4 total) It has a single 8 GB stick of DDR4 RAM and a Lexar SATA 256GB SSD along with a 2TB HDD for storage. Pretty mundane by today's standards but it has all the bits to qualify for a Windows 11 install without using a workaround. I put a couple Apps on it and it runs flawlessly so far on Windows 11 Education.
I'm running Win11 Education edition but it's the 23H2 version (not 24H2 or higher) on an old backup PC as the old AMD cpu on there does not have SSE4.2 support
Thank Thanks for giving it a try, even an older version. I've run Windows Update numerous times since install and have had Zero feature updates so far. Nothing untoward has been foisted upon the OS. I went away (Rainbow Trout Fishing) for over a week and haven't gotten back to anything computer wise yet. Need to catch up.