Installing Windows from Debian

[Wheelerof4te]

I figured that there might be some noobs who have tried Debian or any other Linux distro and decided it's not for them. Let's say that you made a mistake of wiping your entire drive or just thought about wiping Windows and going in cold turkey.

You've tried Linux and you don't like it:
It's ugly (except when it's not).
It has no windows with min/max buttons (vanilla GNOME) (except when it has).
It doesn't have that very special program that you've used all your life and you haven't bothered to check beforehand.
"Windows buttons are on the left side, who the f*ck made this? I want my buttons on the right, Linux sux!" *sigh* Thanks, Canonical!
"Where is my Wi-Fi, goddammit?! Huh, non-free firmware? What the hell is that supposed to mean???"

Since Linux and Windows file systems aren't compatible, booting Windows USB without wiping your drive in some way is not possible natively. But there is one way.
That is to install WoeUSB. WoeUSB can make bootable Windows install USB from within Linux. The only problem is that binaries exist only for Debian, Ubuntu and OpenSUSE distributions. I think there is one in Arch's AUR. Fedora has to compile it from source, and noobs can't do that.
Download WoeUSB (for Ubuntu/Debian) from here:
click

EDIT: Link above is for Ubuntu, and Zesty's .deb file should be usable on Stretch. But what about future versions? There is a slightly harder, but proper Debian way to install WoeUSB. Visit this page and follow instructions in the README.md file. /EDIT
Insert blank USB and select Windows .iso file. Start copying and boot your new Windows install image like you would normaly.

[n_hologram]

Dear n00b in question,
If you find this plea before foolishly erasing Windows, please stop everything you are doing and learn how to use Google, the manpages of your distribution, and also how to compile applications, or you will surely regret your time using Linux.
https://github.com/slacka/WoeUSB

You must make the machine an end in itself, not a means to what it produces...

*p.s.: the only thing more confusing than a cold-turkey Linux install is suggesting a repo-mix from other distributions (ie, Ubuntu) to a potential Debian user (ie, one who's browsing, you know...the Debian forums). I suggest building from source; the instructions for Debian[-based] systems on their github page are clear and pretty easy to follow, and while it's entirely possible that this particular package will never present any issues, it doesn't ensure that future versions will play nicely, nor does it ensure that Ubuntu hasn't made modifications specific to their own distro. Repo-mixing always works great until one day it doesn't.

"B-but it hasn't happened to me, so repomixing must never be a bad thing!"

[Innovate]

I used to do frankendebian by download xenial .deb file from webupd8's PPA's link as well
that

Code: Select all

[url=http://ppa.launchpad.net/nilarimogard/webupd8/ubuntu/pool/main/w/woeusb/]click[/url]

link is: http://ppa.launchpad.net/nilarimogard/w ... /w/woeusb/
is no different they're same pool from webupd8's PPA
https://launchpad.net/%7Enilarimogard/+ ... &start=300
https://launchpad.net/~nilarimogard/+ar ... es_filter=
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/nilarimogard/webupd8/ubuntu xenial main

I've been questioned long ago does download .deb file from ppa's pool link count as frankendebian?
Download .deb file from PPA's pool is the same way that bester did
only different just didn't add ppa but download .deb file from Alin Andrei's PPA pool

That's being said I already have WoeUSB, Unetbootin, boot-repair, grub-customizer in from obs repo long ago
Also I've already fixed the icon to appear on Xfce settings as well.
No more suffering whether you want to delete or want to go back or fix the partition I've them all.
I can just download from synaptic, software-center or download .deb file directly
& install it from obs repo which especially built for Stretch

[Wheelerof4te]

Thanks for the git page. I've succesfully installed Zesty's .deb version on Stretch without any problems. But the problems can arise in the latter versions.
I could have installed from source, README file does contain simple instructions. But that is too much work, and some noob can't possibly install it from source.

And it's not a repo, just a simple .deb file.

EDIT: First post updated with the instructions for building proper Debian package.

[n_hologram]

If punching five lines of code in a root shell is too much work, said n00b probably shouldn't be allowed to use technology

Ubuntu, being debian-like, also includes .deb files, but they are sometimes modified; it's hard to tell without installing it, and risking breakage.

[p.H]

Since Linux and Windows file systems aren't compatible, booting Windows USB without wiping your drive in some way is not possible natively.

Huh ? Why not ? What do filesystems have to do with booting ?

[bw123]

I figured that there might be some noobs who have tried Debian or any other Linux distro and decided it's not for them. Let's say that you made a mistake of wiping your entire drive or just thought about wiping Windows and going in cold turkey.

You've tried Linux and you don't like it:

I have seen thousands of "noobs" and they aren't idiots. People don't generally do this, multi boot has been around as long as I can remember, and I'm older than dirt. Linux is extremely multi-boot friendly. I'm not familiar with recent versions of other operating systems.

Back when I made the switch, most windows installs were "oem" versions and if you hosed your windows install you were likely screwed, unless by some miracle there was a working recovery partition or recovery disks included with your machine. The oem versions were tied to the hard drive as I recall at first, then later there was a really long string of numbers and letters attached to the chassis of a machine's case.

Has that changed? Do people actually have ISOs for their windows machines now?

If someone setup linux on their machine and removed windows, I would not consider that a 'mistake' I think that would be intentional. I have done that several times through the years, and never regretted it once.

[edbarx]

For an attentive person doing Windows' installation, the Windows' installer states cleary what it is going to do before installing to the entire disk erasing Linux. The same thing can be said about the GNU/Linux installer. If it finds that the disk is already used up by another installation, it will inform the user and the latter has to take the appropriate action. The problem probably arises when a user is not patient enough to do some reading before clicking when they don't understand what they are being asked by an installer. As written by other posters, I never accidentally deleted an installation. The only time, according to my somewhat volatile memory, is when I decided to perform the notoriously dangerous conversion from an MBR formatted disk to a GPT disk. In that event, I lost about two installations that were installed to partitions in an extended partition.

Now, a word about Linux not using Microsoft's NTFS file system.

Using a proprietary filesystem like NTFS may require permission from Microsoft and therefore fees to paid if permission in granted. This depends on whether NTFS is patented and the patent is still not expired. NTFS support on Linux is also the result of reverse engineering which means some subtle features might not be fully understood. Ext, ext2, ext3 and ext4 are Linux native with all their implementation details open source.

Multiboot in Linux is easy, provided a user follows strictly a few well defined policies. One of them, is only one installation must be allowed to manage the boot loader, or in the case of UEFI, use the latter's ability to multiboot.

My multiboot policy is to allocated a very small partition (1 GB) to an extremely minimal installation of GNU/Linux, making it the manager of the boot loader. All the other installations are not allowed to manage the bootloader. To make things easier, I use the /vmlinuz and /initrd.img symbolic links instead of the exact kernels' names. [ Note that, using these symbolic links may prevent a user from using more than one kernel version to boot the same installation, although this can be overridden by creating more links to the other kernels. This method can be automated with a script or an executable which I didn't bother to write. ]