With the current heat wave in Mexico City, it’s much to hot to do anything except laying in bed. For that reason, I’ve been seriously getting back into gaming for the last few weeks. I have the wonderful Steam Deck, but at some point, it becomes pretty limiting when it’s your only device. Therefore, I decided to buy the first Windows Laptop since I switched to Mac … 5 years ago? And boy did things change.
My choice fell on the Asus ROG Strix G16, which looked like the ideal mixture of power (latest Core i9, Nvidia RTX 4070), portability, availability (“luxury” electronics tend to be hard to get in Mexico) and price (“luxury” electronics tend to also be a lot more expensive in Mexico then Europe or the US). I decided to get a 32 GB DDR5 5600MHz RAM kit and a faster NVMe (Samsung Pro 990) at the same time, since the build-in 16GB 4800MHz was a little on the small and slow side, and according to all reviews, the stock NVMe disk the device came with was dog-slow.
Of course, the new disk would mean a reinstall of Windows, but how hard could that be? Considering I spent half of my childhood and many early years of adulthood re-installing various Windows versions on a more or less monthly basis! But it turns out I missed a few critical factors:
- Windows doesn’t seem to care about standard chipset/driver support any more?
- General enshittification of Windows and forcing people to use their cloud BS
- And UEFI swept in to make everything
vastly more complicatedbetter
So I inserted the new Samsung disk, popped the stock drive in the second NVMe slot, used the Windows installation media creation tool to prepare an USB stick, selected the USB stick in the laptop’s fancy boot manager and was presented with the standard Windows installer. So far, the process seemed to be the same as every single Windows install I did in the last 20 years.
But behold, the drive select list was totally empty, so I couldn’t select an installation disk. Not only didn’t it show my speedy new Samsung disk, it also didn’t detect the stock disk. I was stumped.
After a bit of googling, it turned out that since Intel processor generation 11 (we’re now at 13, I think), you need to load an additional driver called “Intel® Rapid Storage Technology Driver” at the Windows install drive selection screen, since apparently Windows doesn’t support Intel’s new standard drive interface for NVMe (called VMD). After a bit of confusion (the Asus driver page shows only one entry under the “Chipset Driver” section, you need to click the tiny “show all” for it to actually show you the important stuff), I downloaded the driver.
Next problem – the driver was packed in a self extracting archive. Means you need a running Windows installation to install Windows… great!! Good thing I didn’t immediately formatted the old drive! After copying the driver folder to the installation USB stick and loading it at the drive selection prompt, suddenly both drives were detected by Windows. Day saved?
Not so quick. After copying the necessary files and rebooting a few times, the Windows installation forces you to sign in with your Microsoft Account, and for that, you need internet connectivity… but… Windows detected neither my wired nor my wireless NICs. So no internet during installation.
Go back to Jail, do not collect 200$?
Nope. It’s Windows, so it’s simple, user friendly and intuitive. You just need to endlessly scroll through Microsofts support forums, and you’ll find out you need to press Shift+F10 at the point in the Installation where it’s asking you to connect to WiFi. That opens a command prompt where you have to type (obviously) “OOBE\BYPASSNRO”. Then you have to answer all the questions you answered before again (because you’re a bad boy/girl that doesn’t want to give Microsoft all your data!), but now you are greeted by a friendly “I don’t have Internet” option at the WiFi screen. Heureka!
While I was able to install windows, and even boot into it using the old installation’s boot manager, the colorful UEFI boot manager didn’t offer my new drive as a boot option. I was stumped again.
After more googling (and this was surprisingly hard to find), I figured out the procedure. Super easy, my grandpa could do it (haha). Apparently you need a dedicated EFI partition so that UEFI will be able to boot from your disk. And this partition, necessary to boot Windows, is not created automatically becase… reasons? But here’s how to fix it.
- In Windows (this would probably also be possible in the recovery console if you’re unable to boot into your installation), open CMD as Administrator (the latter one is pretty important, if you forget it you’ll get cryptic error messages)
- Run “
diskpart“ - Select your disk “
select disk X“, with X being your new Windows drive’s number. You can list existing disk numbers using “list disk“, but this is pretty confusing, since it just shows disk numbers, but not e.g. vendor. If you want to make sure you’re not modifying the wrong disk, start the Windows “Disk Management” utility, it will show the disk number as well as drive letter, vendor (under properties) etc. There’s probably a way to show this in diskpart, but this worked for me. - Select the partition Windows is on by running “
select partition X“, with X being the partition number. You can show partition numbers using “list partition“. Normally after a fresh install, there will be only one. - We now need to make space for the EFI partition by running “
shrink desired=200“. - When the disk is resized, we can create the new partition by running “
create partition efi size=200“. - Run “
select disk X” again, with the number of your new partition. Format it with Fat32 by running “format quick fs=fat32” (before formatting, make really sure you’ve got the right partition selected! Otherwise, you’re wiping your fresh Windows install!) - Now we need to assign a drive letter to the new partition by running “
assign letter=z“. The letter doesn’t really matter, we’ll never see it again after finishing this procedure. - Type “
exit” to quick diskpart. Go back to your Administrator CMD (make sure again it’s actually running as Administrator!) - In the Administrator CMD, run the following command: “
bcdboot C:\Windows /s Y:“. If you’re getting a message that files couldn’t be copied, you’re most likely not running the command as Administrator
Restart, and UEFI should now be able to detect your disk as bootable. At this point, you can format the old drive. You now have a full, self-sustaining Windows installation.
Wow.
Is that really the intended end user experience after changing a hard disk? Or are you now just supposed to throw away your device when the drive breaks? I mean having an Intel processor and an NVMe drive has been hardly uncommon in the last… how many years? What happened to Windows? This feels more like installing Linux in ’96 then installing a modern Windows. Well probably the money that used to flow into providing out-of-the-box driver support and simplifying installation went into automatically installing Candy Crush in your Start menu, Ads for OneDrive and into failed AI assistants that nobody asked for.
I’m really hoping gameportingtoolkit or proton are taking off and we can finally just forget about the horrible mess that is Windows. Can’t be that long any more until Windows is irrelevant in the end user market – certainly Microsoft doesn’t seem to care any more.
Just as a comparison – the whole process for installing MacOS on a new drive is pressing the button CMD+Option+R during startup, select the drive and wait for the installation to finish.
But in the end, at least the upgrade was worth it. The new RAM sticks are running at the full 5600MHz (after a BIOS UEFI update), and running some benchmarks on the upgraded vs. stock drive shows almost twice the read and write performance (7000mb/s vs 3500mb/s).
Update (15.07.2023)
After jumping through the hoops to install Windows 11, it now starts nagging to “finish the installation”. Yet another dark pattern (even though compared to the rest, it’s pretty tame) – you have the choice between signing in and “Remind me again in 3 days”. I really hate it (and I’m sure I’m not alone) if I’m forced to consent to something that is clearly not my intention.
But there’s yet another workaround (at least for now).
It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.
Douglas Adams
The solution is as usual obvious, easy to find and only has the best in mind for the user.
No just kidding, it’s Windows 11.
Go to “Setting”, there search for “Notifications”. In “Notifications” scroll down to “Additional settings”. Open “Additional settings” and untick all the boxes. Easy as that.
The Guerito 