1.9 KiB
1.9 KiB
Deploy Windows 10 from Linux
This is a simple Python script that installs Windows 10 to a target disk from a running Linux system (i.e., without booting from Windows installation ISO and without using Windows PE).
Use cases
- Mass-install Windows workstations from a PXE-booted Linux environment. (Here it may be useful to convert install.wim to a pipable WIM file and then you can stream it e.g. using HTTP from a server).
- Provision VMs with Windows 10 with a single command, without any intermediate steps with mounting ISOs, changing boot order and the like.
Limitations
- Currently supports only BIOS boot, not UEFI. But this should be easy to implement.
Additional resources
- Create a windows system from scratch using Linux -- forum thread at reboot.pro that discusses attempts to achieve exactly this
- NTDEV YouTube channel -- videos from crazy Windows experiments and hacks
Windows boot process
- Windows Vista-10 Startup Process summarized on Wikipedia
- Windows 7-10 Master Boot Record -- disassembly and analysis
- Windows 8-10 NTFS Volume Boot Record -- disassembly and analysis
BCD database
- libbcd0 -- Python library for reading/writing BCD databases
- BCD notes, observations, experiments