Okay, previously I’ve covered how to install Windows 10 on a virtual machine. But, as things turned out, I ended up scaling up on Windows 10 rather than scaling down… so now I had to go through the ordeal of figuring out how to install Windows 10 on a physical machine. Here’s what I did.
First of all, I opted to use rewritable media… this meant there would be no DVD burning or the like. But this is where I was having trouble. First of all, modern Windows 10 images are big, 5+ GB. This makes them too large to write to a single-sided DVD, and also too large to write to many older USB stick flash drives. So… for my purposes, I had to resort to using an SD card.
Second… now this complication comes from using an older computer. The hardware could not boot off of an SD card directly, though it had an SD card reader. No worries, I had a USB SD card reader on hand, and doing that solved that problem.
Well… yes. The second problem is, of course, because I had an old laptop, I needed to make sure the image had an MBR boot record. This entailed rewriting the image from the ISO to the SD card using special software. My attempts at Linux-based software failed, so, lo and behold, I had to use my Windows 10 virtual machine to run the Rufus software to write out a proper Master Boot Record image.
20200318/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rufus_(software)
20200318/https://rufus.ie/
Finally, the last problem that I’ve encountered was that although the Windows installation started okay, it later halted complaining that a media driver was not found and I’d have to select the driver install disk to continue. But, never fear, there was an easy workaround for this. First, cancel out of the installer so that you are back to the “Start Install” screen. Now, here’s the trick: remove the USB drive and reinsert it into a different port. You will now be able to continue the install just fine.
What exactly is the problem? Either it “legacy boot” drivers used by the BIOS when booting off of the drive, or it is a USB 2 versus USB 3 port difference, to my knowledge. But, what matters is that it made it work for me. The referenced site also lists a whole host of other things to check for if this doesn’t work for you.
20200318/DuckDuckGo windows 10 a media driver was not found generic sata
20200318/https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-windows_install-winpc/media-driver-is-missing-windows-10-installation/3685bca9-05c5-45e8-91a5-27e23b986ea1
20200318/DuckDuckGo windows 10 a media driver was not found usb install
20200318/https://www.auslogics.com/en/articles/resolving-a-media-driver-is-missing-error-during-windows-10-clean-install/