pbatard
commented
4 years ago Not seeing this issue, be it with Rufus 3.11 or 3.12.
Your assumption about what this mode does is correct, but where you are assuming wrong is that Windows won't let you write to an ESP. If you have the drive GUID (which is what WaitForLogical() waits on) and you are running elevated (which we are), you can write to an ESP even if it doesn't have a drive letter assigned. In other words, it's not because Windows was designed by Microsoft not to assign a drive letter to an ESP that it makes the ESP unavailable or that you can't write to it.
I know however that, for reasons that only Microsoft knows, Windows can sometime decide to be a pain in the ass when trying to access a logical drive that was just created, so I would advise you to try the following:
- Try multiple times
- Unplug and plug the USB drive into a different port
- Try Alt-Z to zero the drive (you can cancel after a while) or try to create a FreeDOS bootable one, and then retry.
If all this fails, then I will need to check your ISO, because I am not seeing an issue with the ones I use.
For the record, here's an example of ISO → ESP mode with the latest debian-testing-arm64-netinst.iso from https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/weekly-builds/arm64/iso-cd/ (which is something I and others test regularly as this the method that's advocated to install vanilla Debian 11 on a Raspberry Pi 4):
lichforever1995
github-actions[bot]
Checklist
<FULL LOG>below.Rufus version: x.y.z- I have NOT removed any part of it.Additionally (if applicable):
(✓)button to compute the MD5, SHA1 and SHA256 checksums, which are therefore present in the log I copied. I confirmed, by performing an internet search, that these values match the ones from the official image.Issue description
I was trying out the Write in ISO → ESP mode feature of Rufus version 3.11 and this message popped up a while after I clicked start:
And the installation failed.
After checking the log and read through the source code, I was confused how this mode is supposed to work. I first assumed this mode allows writting iso file contents into a ESP partition while left the rest of the drive unpartitioned. However, it fails after repartitioning the drive because the newly created ESP partition is not recognized by WaitForLogical() and eventually times out. The drive is left with a empty ESP partition and does not show up in Explorer. So how does this mode actually works?
PS: The image i used is a custom iso using grub2 efi mode, works just fine with ISO image mode
PS: I did a sketchy patch to create a normal data partition instead of ESP partition (by not assign the ESP GUID to that partition), and force convert it to ESP partition ( via the ToggleEsp()) after installation. And it works as how I assumed it would.
Log