Create a single flash drive to boot Win 10 install media, Win 11 media, Macrium recovery media , and more using no 3rd party tools

OK @hsehestedt, if that's your full, complete Menu.ps1 file, then it's cler it can't work. That DO - WHILE loop calls (tries to execute) the menu stored in variable $MainMenu. That variable needs to be created first.

Sample menu in the PS menu tut shows how to make a menu which lets user either to start, stop, export or delete virtual machines. It can easily be modified to cater your needs to run various installers. In fact, as you have already done the DO -WHILE LOOP, most of the work is done. You can see the sample menu provided in tut on my OneDrive: SampleMenu.ps1

It can be broken to two parts. First part is about creating the menu and storing it to variable $MainMenu in lines 1 to 13 (line numbers in screenshots refer to how OneDrive will show this sample menu):



Everything between the brackets { and } (lines 1 and 13) will be stored in variable $MainMenu. Notice that name of the variable can be anything you want, my sample menu just uses $MainMenu.

The second part is then the DO - WHILE loop, which shows the menu, and executes commands based on menu item selected:



In your case, you have already created the second part, DO - WHILE loop. Now you just need to create the variable $MainMenu to execute it.

Kari

Kari, thanks. That solved the inability to boot, get the menu, and run Windows setup. I was not grasping previously that the two pieces were part of the same PowerShell script. Making the corrections now gives me a boot menu from which I can select Windows 10 or 11.

I think I've also worked out the next part in my head, but I'll have to try it in the morning to be sure that it really works as expected.

Thinking about the reflect recovery media, it of course has its own WinPE or WinRE installation along with a boot.wim. Inside that boot.wim is the reflect software. So, in theory, since I already have WinPE running from the first partition, I should be able to extract the contents of the boot.wim to another partition, and in the PowerShell menu reference the reflect.exe executable.

NOTE: My recovery media is actually WinRE based, not WinPE so I'll have to see if the PE based media really looks as I expect, but that's what would make sense to me. I may have to settle for the PE based media but prefer the RE based media for the WiFi support, but I can explore all that in the morning.

In the meantime, thanks yet again for the help.

Until I find somethig better, I now have my final configuration.

Kari, I decided to go on a hybrid between what you have suggested and my original post.

I have a menu that gives me the choice of running Windows 10 or 11. I only have one Win 10 choice and one Win 11 choice because I always integrate all my Windows 10 editions into a single image file, including my customized sysprep images. Upon final release of 11 I'll be doing the same there.

Then, I simply drop my Win Pe and Win RE based media onto separate FAT32 partitions.

It's not so "pretty" but it works. When I boot, the UEFI presents multiple options all on the same external drive. The first option will take me to the menu from which I can select either Windows 10 or 11. At the UEFI screen there will be one additional option for each Win PE / RE partition. Of course, you pretty much have to know what is in each position because the UEFI doesn't display a nice menu. It simply shows the device name which is the same for all options on that disk.

So, for the moment, here is what I have:

Partition 1 > Boot partition with menu inspired by Kari. Allows choice of Win 10 or 11 setup
Partition 2 > Windows 10
Partition 3 > Windows 11
Partition 4 > Macrium Reflect recovery disk based upon Win RE
Partition 5 > Veritas System Recovery, Desktop Edition, Win RE based recovery media
Partition 6 > Small, general purpose partition exclusively for assets such as unattended answer files
Partition 7 > Multi TB BitLocker partition that holds my entire software collection, important documents, etc. Basically, my digital life.

Clearly, since I have 7 partitions, I'm using GPT and leaving compatibility with BIOS / x86 behind. With Windows 11, I've decided to scrap all x86 / BIOS related activities. I literally just scrapped a couple of BIOS based systems and now keep only a single BIOS based laptop for those rare testing needs. In a way it's a shame because I devoted many, many hours developing code that automatically assembled both x86 and x64 editions of Windows into a single Windows image and could inject all the appropriate updates, drivers, etc. into the right places. It now feels like all that work is wasted. On the bright side, it makes future development efforts a lot easier.

Got all the kinks worked out of the process and updated my code. It now automatically creates boot disks with multiple operating systems, multiple Win RE / PE based programs such as a reflect recovery disk, and additional generic partitions on which I can store anything I want. It's kinda fun to watch as all these new drives letters show in File Explorer while it's building the media.

hsehestedt said:

In summary, this is something I've wanted to do for a LONG time (at least Win 10 and Macrium), but it took the realization of a number of pieces before this all came together in my head. I'm still going to try to figure out how some of this works at a low level. Maybe @Kari has some thoughts? :). But in the meantime, I hope that this helps someone else!

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Count me in as one of those that was helped! Most of this thread is way above my knowledge level, but I was able to follow the instructions in the first post and now have two thumb drives that can be used to install Windows 10, Windows 11 and the Macrium Recovery system. Thank you very much!
This saves me from having to remember which thumb drive has what and reduced the number I needed.

Tink009 said:

Count me in as one of those that was helped! Most of this thread is way above my knowledge level, but I was able to follow the instructions in the first post and now have two thumb drives that can be used to install Windows 10, Windows 11 and the Macrium Recovery system. Thank you very much!
This saves me from having to remember which thumb drive has what and reduced the number I needed.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the feedback. I'm glad that this helped!

Kari said:

First, please allow me to take some time with this. I am suffering from serious insomnia, sleeping an hour or two when I can. It causes some concentration and focusing issues, which makes my posting quite irregular. I will check, if my instructions are correct, or if a sleep-deprived me has forgotten something.



Menu.ps was a clear typo, it should be Menu.ps1. Fixed now.



I will check everything.



Yeah, the problem with my method is, that it needs each partition to have an executable, script or batch to run. As I only need Reflect Rescue maybe two or three times a year, I simply have decided not to bother. In those rare occasions I need it, I just use a dedicated Rescue USB,

Honestly, this is where I meet the limits of my knowledge. I have absolutely no idea about how to add Macrium Rescue as menu option to my PS menu.

Kari

Click to expand...

I would try taking the boot wim out of the macrium ISO , putting it on the windows partition and using EasyBCD to add with WIM to the boot menu, so when you click the windows partition, there will be another menu with Macrium in it.

Tink009 said:

Count me in as one of those that was helped! Most of this thread is way above my knowledge level, but I was able to follow the instructions in the first post and now have two thumb drives that can be used to install Windows 10, Windows 11 and the Macrium Recovery system. Thank you very much!
This saves me from having to remember which thumb drive has what and reduced the number I needed.

Click to expand...

I'm not sure how big your thumb drivers are, but if one is big enough, I've found Ventoy to be amazing. Super easy to use, you just put your isos in the root of your usb and you are ready to roll.

ibay770 said:

I'm not sure how big your thumb drivers are, but if one is big enough, I've found Ventoy to be amazing. Super easy to use, you just put your isos in the root of your usb and you are ready to roll.

Click to expand...

One is 64GB and the other is 32GB. I used the extra space to put folders containing program installation files on them as well. What appealed to me was that I was able to use what I already knew how to do (using Diskpart, for example) and what I already had, Macrium, to accomplish this.
I'm still learning about operating systems and have only had time to really look under the hood since I've retired.

ok I can understand that. Try making another partition and extracting the Macrium iso to it and see what happens.

ibay770 said:

I'm not sure how big your thumb drivers are, but if one is big enough, I've found Ventoy to be amazing. Super easy to use, you just put your isos in the root of your usb and you are ready to roll.

Click to expand...

It also supports WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files, BTW... Also, the partition that holds these files can be formatted as exFAT, which gives the extra benefit of not having to rely on NTFS when you don't need/want to, as exFAT was specifically designed with USB flash drives in mind whereas NTFS causes significant overhead that gives you nothing in return in situations when you don't actually require to use file/folder permissions, file attributes, hardlinks/symlinks or ADS. Even if you do require them, Ventoy gives the option to use multiple partitions, each one of which can be formatted as whatever it is that you prefer, and that also includes NTFS. What that means is, it is possible to combine the methods described in this thread with Ventoy's ability to boot straight into an image file. If you do that, then you don't have to constantly rebuild (modify) your image files in situations where doing so would be wasting too much time, as you can instead just keep the contents of each one of these specific image files in question stored as a separate NTFS partition like how you "normally" would ("normally" = as if Ventoy were not present on the device), on the same USB flash drive. In short, Ventoy doesn't force you to use bootable image files. It merely adds the option to save valuable time, storage capacity, and USB bandwidth in situations when booting directly into an image file (i.e., instead of patiently waiting for its contents to be extracted onto a separate partition dauntingly slow before booting from said partition) is desirable. The EFI partition that Ventoy uses to deliver such great freedom of choice is a FAT32 partition that takes up 32 MEGABYTES. It knocks me unconscious why so many people keep refusing to see the light. :)

hdmi said:

It knocks me unconscious why so many people keep refusing to see the light. :)

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Bear in mind that the original idea was to simply see what could be done with no third-party tools. So it's basically a learning exercise. There are a bunch of utilities that can help with this, so I encourage everyone to experiment and use what works for you.

hsehestedt said:

Bear in mind that the original idea was to simply see what could be done with no third-party tools. So it's basically a learning exercise. There are a bunch of utilities that can help with this, so I encourage everyone to experiment and use what works for you.

Click to expand...

It's not a question of what does or doesn't work for me. For me, both of these two different techniques work, and have worked for quite some time, which immediately helps to explain why I use the combination of both of them like I said, and I also use this combination on a single USB flash drive, I know that it's possible, and, also it is possible with a single USB flash drive so, I love to have my cake and eat it too.

When I said "what works for you" I meant it in the common usage of the idiomatic phrase, not literally. In other words, use what you prefer. :)

I wonder if creating three partitions with 3 drive letters would work to do that? You would then create Win 10 media on 1 partition, Win 11 on another & MR boot on the third.

Tutorial links in post 12 updated. Earlier links pointed to now closed Wndows Questions site.