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I haven't tried it but that's what this says it does https://www.q4os.org/dqa014.html
yeah. create a 8gb partition on the new drive, format it as fat32.
copy the ISO's contents (not the ISO, its contents) to the 8gb partition. shut down when done.
optional, disconnect the windows drive so you don't fuck it up.
power on, press whatever the key is for the boot menu for your UEFI. it should list the installer as a boot option. hit that.
final step, equally important. when the GRUB menu appears, press "e" on the menu item and find the linux kernel switches (where it says "quiet splash" etc) and add toram (debian/ubuntu) or rd.live.ram (fedora). this will boot the image to ram. so when you start the installer you can select wipe & use whole disk.
suerte!
edit: this assumes you're doing it on a EFI/UEFI system, which is any board/laptop after 2012.
Just to point it out: Having a USB stick with a Linux ISO laying around can be a lifesaver.
Even if you decide to go back to Windows or whatever.
Because you can actually boot off of the USB stick into a practically fully functional OS, so without installing, and then access the files on the hard drive, in case your installed operating system bites the dust (so long as the hard drive and filesystem is intact).
So yeah, might be worth the invest...
Setting up a flash drive with Ventoy is something I'd highly recommend. Then you can just drag-n-drop isos as you see fit and boot any of them from a nice menu. I keep one around with Fedora, CachyOS, Arch, and Clonezilla isos. I also think I may have an older version of Garuda on it. It's a super useful thing to have around.
things like ventoy are extremely convenient. been using it or a predecessor for years.. but i've run into more images lately that won't boot (or an install fails) from one, so i end up using a different flash and writing the image to it directly (usually with rufus if on win, gnome disks if not). i now have two flash drives dedicated to such reuse.
I and others agree... It's funny when someone says "I want a solution besides X" and we all kinda have to say "uhhhh, srsly, X is the answer" - - also another shout out for Ventoy. Complete game changer. I have a 16GB drive with Win10 IoT LTSC, new install apps and drivers for Windows, and 2 or 3 Linux distros.
Edited, typos
It's funny when someone says "I want a solution besides X" and we all kinds to to say "uhhhh, srsly, X is the answer"
I mean, yeah, you kind of have to point it out. Newbies won't be able to judge how much they're making their life harder by wanting to do it their way. 🫠
I'm not doubting a usb is better, i uaed those to install windows in basically every PC I've built for me or friends. But...usually I am borrowing other ppls. Now I work seasonal jobs and don't have a permanent home so...can't really quickly access a store if I'm in the middle of nowhere in a national park
I understand that you are materially constrained.
If you don't already have your solution, I wonder if you could Ventoy (using as a verb here) a partition of the NVME as an install volume.
My USB drive is actually a spare NVME in a USB enclosure, ironically enough.
I've never tried it, but you can use UNetbootin to do that.
Wow, I did not know about this, very cool!
I think you can also use Ventoy over the network (which I have never tried either).
People are making this to be much more of a fuss than it really is. It’s actually fairly easy:
You can write the linux iso to the NVMe, boot the NVMe, then write the linux install onto the same NVMe. This requires the linux iso load itself into RAM on boot, which is most of them, but not all.
This is a tricky question, mostly because you tagged it as "Noob"... It is technically possible, but it does require jumping through some hoops I would not normally recommend to a novice. Attempting through a VM is probably the safest option, but pointing a VM to an entire physical disk isn't typically something I would recommend, but is likely much safer than doing live partition editing manually and on the fly.
So...I'm not a noob to computers, I run my own jellyfin server, minecraft server, I almost had a comp sci minor in college, but I've just been so in the windows ecosystem that I don't really know what applies for linux and rather than act like I "know computers" I'll be honest, linux is something I know nothing about, windows I can do basically all my troubleshooting on my own+internet access
Yeah, not a bad stance to have. When I switched to Linux (in the middle of a compsci minor), I thought I was the king of the world and that I knew everything about computers.
Then Linux showed me that I know fuckall, not because it was particularly hard, but rather because it's an open library.
You can look at a random config file on your PC and it will explain you highly technical concepts for free.
You can look at the source code of anything you're interested in. Well, or probably rather read an explainer from someone who read/wrote the source code.
And you can easily look at the logs of your applications to debug them.
Every so often, I run into folks that genuinely seem to know a lot about Windows, and I always wonder how. It doesn't explain anything to you. 😅
In that case, I would advise you read the unetbootin wiki about "hard disk install modes" and see how much of it you feel comfortable with. It is a bit of hoop jumping but if you are comfortable with partition editors it seems to be the most straight forward method to me.
Someone mentioned netboot.xyz, but reading their docs I couldn't (quickly) find a way to set it up from windows without having some sort of boot media, and it would require another entire device on the network to boot from, which seems way more expensive than a USB drive.
https://github.com/rltvty2/ulli
Never used that program before because I have usbs.
You could also use wsl
I installed from inside vmware before, with the linux drive mounted natively, then removed the windows drive.
This feels wrong but I don't know why. It just feels like it would break somewhere. I've never given a vm its own physical drive though.
When my freebsd home server died I just put it's disks into my gaming rig and connected them to a VM and it booted with no hassle. It will work for linux too, unless you have architecture differences or some whacky secure boot setup, or highly customized kernel or something.
It's honestly genius and idk why I hadn't considered that it could be done until now
Passing physical drives through to a VM is the only way I install Windows anymore, that way it can't fuck up my boot order or EFI partition, since I use Linux daily. Can't wait for the day I don't need Windows, alas, medical device update software often requires Windows/Mac, and passing the USB through to a VM doesn't work.
I'm pretty sure past dual boot woes and originally learning Linux, when I was confused about efi/uefi or the boot process altogether, is what's getting to me. Most of my VM use is from that time, transitioning to bare metal.
Hopefully one day we can get actual parity in niches like what you need without porting every little thing, and I know I've had devices with firmware updates requiring windows that I probably ignored. Gaming has already come so far though, so maybe there's hope!
I make a partition on my main drive which I load any .iso on to it. Usually I keep a Linux Mint .iso there in case I need a basic set of tools outside of my main Operating System for when I mess up my main OS. I can load that .iso partition at boot through the BIOS menu.
I'm sure you can do the same with an NVME drive. You may need to check the BIOS boot order to make sure you start your preferred OS when booting your system.
I used to do this too, I confirm this works and is a good idea, it is convenient especially if you plan to distrohop a bit or know you will reset a couple times to experiment a bit
Yes there are lots of methods to do this. Format the disk to something like ext4, untar a distro to it, then with wsl chroot into the disk, finish installing and configuring everything, then reboot to the new disk. You will need specific time to do an this, but should be fairly straight forward.
I essentially did exactly this for my current setup.
There are other ways to.
You can use a raw disk in VirtualBox. Just make sure you install an initrd and kernel which has drivers for all of your hardware. If you let something autodetect hardware, it will detect the virtual hardware, not the real one.
I had tricks using native disks reliably in VirtualBox which I had been dabbling with for more than 15 years, and I had to move to using QEMU for my NAS disks. I quotient recommend these paths for noob level project.
You could use netboot.xyz: https://netboot.xyz/docs/booting/uefi
There are several ways, but they are all quite involved. Reading the comments Helix's comment seems the easiest, given that VirtualBox can really use raw disks, which I have not heard of before. To this I wish to add, if this method works you don't need to worry about drivers. The linux kernel has all the drivers you are likely to need & initrd is taken care of by all the distro installers, so you just need to directly install from the iso normally & not use an automated installer if VirtualBox has such options.
I don’t have USB drives and they cost too much for something i never use.
If you care about Linux it's worth getting a usb drive, $4 gets you a usable drive in most parts of the world. (8GB is enough)
If you end up getting one, my suggestion is to make it a ventoy drive, even if you only have one iso file on the drive (which you'll need to boot in grub2 mode) , you'll still get the recovery benefit of ventoy, meaning if something* happens to your linux bootloader, ventoy will still be able to boot it up np most of the time.
*If you have two separate EFI partitions on two disks it's unlikely that Windows would touch the other, but stranger things have happened.
Honestly I might justvwait until I can maybe build like a miniPC for jellyfin and put linux on that one to start learning then. Might be easier
If you are not afraid of the command line, then there is dd for windows(or in wsl) which you can use to write an .iso file to any disk. Command usually is dd if=path\to\iso of=path\to\disk bs=4MB
i think i did this long time ago with WSL. there was some way to mount a physical disk's filesystem.
You might have a MicroSD or SD cars lying around which you can use as a USB stick with a $1 reader e.g. from Aliexpress.
this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2026
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