If you just want the Windows 10 not wanting to install bit, skip the next four paragraphs of background!
You may remember that I bought and returned a Dell Inspiron 15 Gaming 7567 several months ago (around April). I liked it for the most part, but there were two deficits I couldn’t get past. First, the edge of the palmrest facing the user was far too sharp, causing pain where the wrists rest on it, and second, the incompatibility of the touchpad with any Windows other than 10, thanks to a Microsoft-led embargo on drivers for anything better.
Well… I saw a Black Friday deal for a successor to the 7567. It’s the Dell G3-3567. The sharp edge is muted, and while I presume the touchpad is the same as before and will also not work with Windows other than 10, I don’t really care about that anymore since I’ve switched to Linux. So, the G3 is now mine, and currently is resting right under my fingers. I got it at a better price than the 7567, and it’s a higher-spec unit (it has the i7 hexacore instead of the older i5 quad without hyperthreading, though the wisdom of leaving that enabled is questionable).
One of the first things I did was to put Linux on the laptop. As it’s my current OS of choice on my other PCs, I put KDE Neon on it, and once again got Nvidia Prime Sync working (for no-tearing performance), as I had with the 7567. I installed one of my Linux games on it, and it’s incredibly smooth and fluid– better than my desktop (as you might expect, given its several years old GPU).
After that, I removed the existing drives (a 1TB HDD and a 128GB SATA SSD) and replaced them with a 1TB 2.5″ SSD which had until then been in the Core 2 Duo laptop, and a new Samsung 970 Evo NVMe PCIEx4 SSD (250GB).
Edit: I missed this paragraph in the initial write-up I did. Initially, Macrium Reflect didn’t want to recognize the NVMe drive, which was where I wanted to put the restored Neon. So I tried booting the Neon install USB drive I already had on hand, and it was able to install Neon to the NVMe drive without any problem. After that, Macrium was able to see and restore to the NVMe drive, so I restored the Neon installation I had backed up over the new Neon install I had done (since I’d already done the work of setting up Nvidia Prime and such in the backed-up version).
I restored the backup I’d made of the Linux install to the new NVMe drive without a problem, but with all of that extra room (1.25TB), I figured I ought to put 10 back on just for the little annoying things, like updating the firmware and performing backups from Macrium (I know I can use the USB rescue drive to back up, but it’s easier to just reboot into Windows).
So, I was going to install Windows 10 on a NVMe SSD in the Dell G3 gaming laptop that already had Linux on it. I had the original installation backed up, but I might as well do a clean install rather than trying to get that to work on a drive that already has an existing Linux installation (generally it is advised to install Windows first and then Linux in a dual-boot setup). I had left unallocated space on the SSD during the Linux installation process for the future Windows installation.
So, should be simple, right? Just pop in a USB installer drive and go? Well, I’d thought so. After I created the 1803 drive (Home version, unfortunately, but I don’t plan to use it except for odds and ends), I booted it, and the Windows installer told me that a necessary media driver was missing, and that I should enter the path to the correct driver.
Yeah, that’s all the info it gave about this mysterious driver it needed. Media driver. No more information than that! How can I tell what the correct driver is if you haven’t told me anything? I know that MS wants to simplify things by removing what they consider to be unnecessary info, but that’s not unnecessary! I need to know what device needs a driver.
So I did some searching, and found that it’s actually a fairly common error in Windows 10. I tried unpacking some of the drivers (like Intel’s RST driver, which made the most sense) and leading the installer to them, and while it seemed promising when it gave the choice of several drivers and let me choose which to install, none of them did anything– it rejected them all after trying for a long while.
I tried redownloading the ISO directly (1809 this time) rather than using the MS media creation tool, and I tried writing that with Rufus as well as from the Linux Mint USB drive writer tool (which I use in Neon without any issue). Same thing each time. I tried all of the USB ports, since some of the people had said changing that helped. I tried changing the port after I’d encountered the error message, as some others had suggested. None of it was any help.
Finally, I saw one post from someone who suggested formatting the USB stick in NTFS rather than the “works on everything” option of FAT32, so I tried that in Rufus, and lo and behold: that worked. The Windows installer was unable to cope with its own FAT32 format (the standard for USB drives), on this PC at least. I’ve used Windows 8.1 USB drives as FAT32 with all kinds of PCs, including the 7567 which was very much like this one, and they worked fine… but Windows 10 didn’t. I have to imagine that the FAT32 Windows USB works in most cases, or else this would be as big a headline as the other Windows woes have been… but it’s very strange. The Linux installer just worked fine right off the bat, but Windows didn’t.
Once I got Windows installed, it self-activated without issue. A sudo update-grub was all I needed to make the dual boot work. I then turned on secure boot, and all still works. So I now have a UEFI, secure boot, dual-boot Linux/Windows 10 PC where Linux was installed first, working fine. I’d never done it that way before.
So now I have 10 again. Yay?
I can be completely free of bare-metal Windows if I want, but there’s no sense in being ideological about it. A PC is a tool, and Windows still has some utility even though I don’t really use Windows anymore in daily use, and since the license is already paid for, I might as well make use of it for as long as it has some benefit.
The thing for me is that I have yet to find any backup programs for Linux that work as well as Macrium Reflect or Aomei Backupper. Aomei has removed the encryption option from their recent free versions, which was the only reason I was using that instead of Reflect for my go-to backup needs, so for now I am back on Reflect (free version). I know the devs need to make a living, but I am loath to pay for Windows software (and encourage the devs to only make Windows versions) that I only use in Windows because there is no other choice… if anyone introduced a bona fide equal to Reflect or True Image (minus the bugs and bloat) for Linux, I’d jump on that. I’d thought that Terabyte had a good solution, but it turns out that it’s just a Linux program to create a live USB stick from which to do the backing up. I can do that with any of the Windows based programs too! Reflect, Backupper, True Image can all image Linux installations from the rescue media. I’d like something that can work in the background, like on Windows. Linux is capable of what would be called shadow copy in Windows– from what I understand, it had that before Windows did. It just takes someone to develop a real imaging backup program (rather than a file-level backup) for Linux.
Actually, Acronis does have a Linux version of their software, but not the consumer-oriented True Image. It costs $500 a year per PC, if I recall, which is just a bit out of my price range. Not every Linux installation is a server in an enterprise setting where such costs are justified!
So, for now, I have Windows 10 Home for creating backups of my Linux installation and for performing BIOS updates. I installed Windows Update blocker on it, so that I can actually have it do what I want rather than decide my boot into it for backing up has to wait for updating that I don’t need. I’ll have to see how well it works, given Microsoft’s attempts to defeat efforts to block the forced updates.
I could use a DOS-booting USB drive to perform the firmware updates, and I could use a USB bootable rescue drive for Macrium Reflect to do the backups, but this is faster and more convenient. On the NVMe drive, booting into either Windows or Linux is lightning fast, and I don’t have to fumble through piles of USB drives and try to find the one that has Reflect on it. If Windows manages to punch through Windows Update blocker, I might just end up going the USB route anyway. In the rare occasions I might boot into Windows, it is because I have a job for it right now, not later, not eventually, not someday… now.
Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)
Nice article.
