UEFI Windows Installing

[Pic0o]

Howdy. My latest adventure is setting up a HP ProLiant ML150 Server with Windows Server 2012. I keep forgetting how I get workable USB install media, so I am making a guide to that effect.

 

Starting off, there used to be a MS ISO to USB Making Tool, however it fails to make the USB stick from the .iso with an nondescript message. So to make a working, UEFI compliant boot USB stick, we are going to format is as FAT32. This is very similar to setting up a Raspberry Pi SD card as well. However using a Windows Install CD and Win32DiskImager does not work, so to get it working:

• Open Command Prompt in elevated mode (Run as Administrator)
• Type diskpart and press Enter
• Type list disk and press Enter. Note the list of existing disks.
• Insert the USB Disk.
• Type list disk and press enter again. Note the new disk showed up which is our USB disk. I assume the new disk is 2 for example purpose.
• Type select disk X where X is your USB disk. E.g., select disk 2. Press Enter.
• Type clean and press enter.
• Type create partition primary and press enter to create primary partition 1.
• Type select partition 1 and press enter.
• Type active and press enter to make the partition 1 active
• Type format fs=fat32 quick (Or use the Right-Click step to quick format).
• Exit diskpart.
• (or instead of format in diskpart) Right-Click the drive in (My) Computer and do a Quick Format to FAT32.(Otherwise it will not UEFI Boot, only legacy boot)
• Extract the contents of the .iso and copy them to the root of the USB stick (Use 7zip or Winrar like archiver tools)

Re-written steps thanks to the following guide. I use quick format, as a full format on multiple GB drives, takes quite a long time for no real good reason.

 

Without over-complicating why you want UEFI for more recent device boot options, you will have a worse time trying to legacy boot an install on a UEFI BIOS enabled system. Thus installing from UEFI media works the best to avoid issues. Luckily Kali and Ubuntu work out the gate with UEFI, so long as you boot the CD Drive / USB as a UEFI target. This allowed me to remove Windows 8.1 from a 2 in 1 tablet and make a Kali / Ubuntu multi-boot instead.