pbatard
commented
3 years ago I remember thousands of people using usb recovery as an option for windows 7 so it's got to be a program issue not windows os issue.
I don't quite follow your logic there, especially as the vast majority of people would have been installing Windows on old platforms, that are more likely to actually be compatible with Windows 7 than recent ones. One thing to bear in mind for instance is that Windows 7 has no native support for a lot of the modern hardware, starting with USB 3.0.
It appears to be an issue with your UEFI :NTFS boot loader of yours
I'm afraid I can disprove that (see below).
But for one thing, you need to realize that all the UEFI:NTFS boot loader does is load a generic NTFS driver (and, if you do read the UEFI specs, you'll understand that as far as ANY UEFI operations are concerned, such as booting, they are 100% file system agnostic, meaning that it really doesn't matter one bit if the file system on which the boot files reside is FAT32, NTFS, ext4, or whatever niche file system you want to use. In other words: NO, FAT32 is not more "special" for boot than NTFS in the UEFI world).
I have a screenshot showing the entire drive is only NTFS this is not normal bios booting protical.
Yes, you have a screenshot demonstrating that Microsoft's Disk Manager is doing a poor job at showing all the partitions, as there should be a second FAT32 partition displayed after the NTFS one, that contains the UEFI:NTFS files. You will see that partition listed with DISKPART, but not Disk Manager, as Disk Manager seems to "remove" partitions that are smaller than a specific size.
As to this not being normal, well, for one thing, a single NTFS partition is how you would boot a Windows 7 installer for BIOS, since the BIOS bootloaders would reside in the MBR and the PBR (Partition Boot Record). So this is super-normal for BIOS. And for UEFI, because of what I explained above, this is not abnormal, as, once again, as long as you have an NTFS driver (and more and more motherboards have one... which I'll also talk about below), you can boot whatever file system. So you can very well have a single NTFS or ext4 partitions, with a UEFI bootloader, and there's nothing abnormal about it if you have support for said file system in UEFI.
So please do not confuse "uncommon" for "abnormal". The one thing UEFI specs mandate is that, as opposed to an NTFS or ext4 driver, there should at least be a FAT32 UEFI driver included in the UEFI firmware, which in turn means that, where possible, most people would create a FAT32 based drive, since you are then guaranteed that a UEFI firmware should be able to access that file system for boot. But again, all it takes for UEFI to access a file system for boot is to have a driver for it, so, even if you don't have a driver for a specific file system, what you can do is use a chain loader located on a small FAT32 partition (which you can place at the end of the drive, because there again there's nothing in the UEFI specs that says that the boot partition has to be the first one) and use a boot loader there to load the file system drive you need and chain load the main UEFI bootloader on the non FAT32 main partition. Well, that is just what UEFI:NTFS does, and, again, if you want to tell me that this is "abnormal", then you're going to have to point me to the part of the UEFI specs that indicates so, because I believe I do have acquired some insight into those, and I have yet to find anything to state that this method should not be used, or even, is likely to cause issues.
Normal windows boot from bios and even linux I believe have a fat32 partition for the boot loader while your tool does not
It actually does. But you need to use a non-crippled disk partition utility (i.e. not Microsoft's Disk manager) to see it. So, already, we are starting with something that you attribute to an issue with Rufus to an issue with Windows. But again, you don't have to take my word for it: Just use any other partition utility, or even DISKPART from the commandline, and see for yourself.
Okay, now to the main point:
rufus doesn't work with windows 7 isos on modern or old devices
How many devices have you tested?
I have tested a media created from your ISO with Rufus 3.14 on a Dell Optiplex 390 (which is a fairly old UEFI based PC), an ASUS Z87 based PC (a not so recent, but not so old PC) and a NUC i7 based PC (which was only released last year), and I saw no freezing issue with the first two. So, the first thing we can dismiss from the get go is your generic statement that "Rufus doesn't work with windows 7 isos on old devices", because I can demonstrate otherwise, and I also know that there are still a lot of folks using Rufus to reinstall Windows 7 on their old devices.
But what about that (modern) i7 based PC?
Well, there I saw your freezing issue... However, the real nice thing about these modern PCs, which also helps demonstrate what I was stating above about FAT32 not being anything special when it comes to UEFI boot, is that this Intel NUC does actually provide a native UEFI NTFS driver, alongside the FAT32 one.
Which means that we can also create a pure NTFS media, WITHOUT USING RUFUS AT ALL, from your ISO, and see if that fares any better. All that's needed is create a single NTFS partition (I even made sure I didn't use Rufus at all to do that) and extract the content of the ISO onto it with something like 7-zip. Then (because Windows 7 is old and doesn't come with a formal EFI bootloader), you also need to extract Windows\Boot\EFI\bootmgfw.efi from sources/install.wim (which can also be done with 7-zip) and copy that as /efi/boot/bootx64.efi.
Lo and behold, if you do that, and try that media on the NUC i7, you find that it has no trouble running the EFI bootloader (which again validates what I said about UEFI not caring one bit on whether the file system is FAT32 or NTFS as long as it has a driver for it) but it freezes in the same way as the media that was created by Rufus, even though Rufus was not used at all to create this media.
Conclusion: We have demonstrated that your freezing issues have nothing to do with Rufus, but everything to do with trying to use an obsolete OS with hardware that it simply is too old to support. Again, for one thing, Windows 7 has no native support for USB 3.0, and you can bet that it probably has trouble supporting some of the more modern CPU or hardware features.
Especially, by the time Windows freezes, the UEFI NTFS driver should no longer be in use (as the first thing Windows does is start its own kernel with its own device and file system drivers, that are completely isolated from UEFI ones), so, if you want to solve this "freezing" matter, you will need to take it to Microsoft... which you can't, since they have declared Windows 7 obsolete.
Or, more succinctly, you probably want to stop trying to install an OS that has been declared obsolete, as you won't get much support for issues like this, be it from Microsoft or from me.
As I believe I have answered your question, and especially considering that, just like Microsoft, I am no longer officially supporting the installation of Windows 7, I will close this issue.
jredfox
the iso straight from microsoft https://download.microsoft.com/download/0/6/3/06365375-C346-4D65-87C7-EE41F55F736B/7601.24214.180801-1700.win7sp1_ldr_escrow_CLIENT_PROFESSIONAL_x64FRE_en-us.iso
issue: it boots but, then freezes before the windows 7 logo fully does it's animation....
I remember thousands of people using usb recovery as an option for windows 7 so it's got to be a program issue not windows os issue. It appears to be an issue with your UEFI :NTFS boot loader of yours I have a screenshot showing the entire drive is only NTFS this is not normal bios booting protical. Normal windows boot from bios and even linux I believe have a fat32 partition for the boot loader while your tool does not
what I have tried: GPT partition MBR partition enabling and disabling legacy boot changed the cluster size to 16kb instead of default downloading an earlier version of windows 7 iso that can be compatible with fat32 format. that seemed to work with MBR partitioning. While windows 7+ isn't suppose to be booted through a legacy boot nor in MBR
yes I: had secure boot off tried multiple usb drives (lexar and sandisk) changed the boot order to prefer usb drives first waisted all day trying to get rufus working with different configurations and bios configurations
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