News How to Clean Install Windows 11, No Product Key Required

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This is so exciting - finally a way to create a W11 ISO.

In terms of booting from USB, the article says not to use a FAT32-formatted drive due to the 4GB file size limitation, or NTFS drives without having to switch off Secure Boot. And instead shows a workaround, using both file systems on one drive.

But what about exFAT drives, for example? Does using exFAT bypass both of those limitations at once? I'm still quite new to this, so am not sure how it works.
 
Or, just enable Hyper-V on your machine and then install Windows 10 as a VM. then upgrade to Win 11 and test. Like I did. Very easy. No need to mess around with your machine.
 
I was just wondering, I don't know if this has been covered in any of the other articles, and most other articles were based on upgrading. But what's the install size of Windows 11, without upgrading?
Personally, I'm old school (other way of saying 'old as dirt'), and my favourite OS was Windows 2000 Server. It was basic, small, efficient, etc. I don't need all these pretty little windows and animations. I can install extra stuff if I want, but I'd prefer to just run something simple, basic, and run Steam, uPlay, Origin, etc.
 
excalibur1814 said:
Or, just enable Hyper-V on your machine and then install Windows 10 as a VM. then upgrade to Win 11 and test. Like I did. Very easy. No need to mess around with your machine.
Click to expand...

To do that don't you need to connect your account to windows insider (if it isn't already?) Can you update to 11 from 10 without activating windows 11 on your account, registering your key, activating windows 10?
 
mac_angel said:
I was just wondering, I don't know if this has been covered in any of the other articles, and most other articles were based on upgrading. But what's the install size of Windows 11, without upgrading?
Personally, I'm old school (other way of saying 'old as dirt'), and my favourite OS was Windows 2000 Server. It was basic, small, efficient, etc. I don't need all these pretty little windows and animations. I can install extra stuff if I want, but I'd prefer to just run something simple, basic, and run Steam, uPlay, Origin, etc.
Click to expand...

I did a fresh install in a VM, ran windows update. Space used is 38.6 GB. If you don't like animations, you won't like this. There are probably ways to turn them off.
 
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You can install it without internet connection, just do alt+f4 ... on the account screen

And there is a hack for bypassing the tpm protection and secure boot, for what i've seen they do some hack in the boot.wim and they use some windows 10 files for the hardware detection.
 
I have downloaded this 3 times and each time I have had errors so the iso would not work. I was able to upgrade but can't make an iso for fresh install
 
mac_angel said:
I was just wondering, I don't know if this has been covered in any of the other articles, and most other articles were based on upgrading. But what's the install size of Windows 11, without upgrading?
Personally, I'm old school (other way of saying 'old as dirt'), and my favourite OS was Windows 2000 Server. It was basic, small, efficient, etc. I don't need all these pretty little windows and animations. I can install extra stuff if I want, but I'd prefer to just run something simple, basic, and run Steam, uPlay, Origin, etc.
Click to expand...

You'll need 64 gigs of hard drive space.
 
Got it installed on a couple of virtual machines (VirtualBox and VMWare) but it still wants a product key. From what I see so far, no reason to upgrade from 10 to 11. Still have Win7 on one of my machines and it works just fine.
 
I hope you all using spare machines, Win 11 dev builds are the newest version, doesn't make them the most stable. I didn't notice anything in article saying why not to install it on main PC. With LInus showing how to install it on almost anything now, I expect there is no point telling people not to install the new shiny.

An example of why you might not want to connect all your drives to it - https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/pc-partitions-became-raw.3713085/
 
reddog76 said:
On a physical machine is not working. TPM and Secure Boot requirements aren't bypassed. Not yet.
Click to expand...
Same here. Didn't work on an old Dell system with an i5. No TPM, No SecureBoot options in BIOS.

Chopper602 said:
I have downloaded this 3 times and each time I have had errors so the iso would not work. I was able to upgrade but can't make an iso for fresh install
Click to expand...
I had a similar issue the first time attempting it. The blue CMD prompt window where it starts compiling everything, I was getting errors. It would continue the script to the end, but I noticed that the final directory of files wasn't complete and the ISO wasn't as big as it should've been.
Interestingly, I ran the same thing on a different system and it completed all the compiling steps correctly. I don't know what was ultimately the difference. Maybe it was nothing except some general error on my first system/attempt.
 
i got errors first 2 times I ran the uup file, it was only when I double clicked on the exe instead of right clicking it that it actually finished. So I have the ISO and was going to run in VM. But due to a blunder I am currently running win 11 on this PC so I don't need ISO.
 
I tried to install from the iso (english-version, only 4.05GB) as virtual machine in VirtualBox (latest) on a dynamic disk of 60GB w 8GB of RAM, but the installer says that my machine does not meet the requirements :-((
I also tried with a disk of 80GB static allocation. This gives the same result.
The installer does not tell me which of the requirements are not met.
Is it possible to enable secure boot and TPM on a VirtualBox-machine, or is it impossible to install Win11 as VM in VirtualBox?
 
karls0, Have you tried going to VirtualBox Settings -> System -> Enable EFI? Otherwise your VM will be trying to boot with BIOS.
 
Comparing 10 to 11... right now, the difference isn't that big. The changes aren't that big that you constantly reminded you using a different version. Unless you spend all day looking in settings or start menu; Or haven't moved the start button to left hand side.

Hard to find differences that aren't skin deep. File Explorer is a work in progress, it lacks features that I assume will come back but its not better that 10 by any means.
 
I am very much a novice and trying to learn and follow all this step by step. I was able to get to the point of double clicking "uup_download_windows.cmd" and instead of a getting a blue command prompt window, mine is black and I notice mine doesn't say administrator at the top. I also did a right click and run as admin the with same black command prompt window. I get a message inside the command prompt window that says the following:

"Current directory contains spaces in its path.
Please move or rename the directory to one not containing spaces.
Press any key to continue . . ."

I followed the directions exactly as stated. Any suggestions on how to proceed or where I went wrong?

Thank you
 
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