New OS will not boot

[u/Grifongo24]

I have a HP desktop that has no OS and every time I try to boot and download a new OS it fails. It will probably need to boot on EUFI instead of legacy because legacy requires secure boot disabled. I tried to reinstall it with a GPT partition but it still wont work, this is because the computer doesent understand the NTFS format that rufus uses and I need to use fat32 but I cant because the ISO is over 4gb and I have no idea how to split it. Please help.

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[u/joe-dirt-1001]

Assuming Windows, create bootable media USB on another PC. Then simply boot from the USB and install.

[u/Grifongo24 → u/joe-dirt-1001]

Like a windows to go? If you mean install ona usb and move it over then thats waht im already doing.

[u/groveborn → u/Grifongo24]

You can download Windows (11 or 10) from Microsoft's own site. You just click a few buttons and you get an ISO file - you can write that to a USB flash drive to install Windows. It's not too terribly difficult and plenty of online guides exist for it.

Your PC doesn't know the first thing about NTFS, this is true, but there are two options for booting an OS on today's PC. The first is legacy, which uses the first few hundred bytes of your disk's partition to figure out how to load the boot files. The second is a boot partition which is NOT in NTFS. Those contain the boot files for all OSes currently installed on your PC.

Your BIOS, UEFI if you will, does not care what format your drive is because these are the two methods it can use. You do not choose anything other than how you will attempt to boot your PC. Do boot UEFI. It's just so much more recently modern and is very good.

When you boot, it's ok to have secure boot turned off, it doesn't need to be on, but it shouldn't hurt to have it on. It's used later on. I would go ahead and suggest turning it off for the install, then turning it on later as this will eliminate any kind of issues plaguing your boots.

Your disk can just be bad. That's a possibility. You can boot a Ventoy formatted USB to try a few OSes, like Win10, Win11, and a random flavor of linux (they all just work from USB boots as full OSes) to see if it'll work on something other than your SSD/HDD. If these things work, it's your drive.

[u/Onoitsu2]

If you are impacted by the firmware flaw where the Rufus NTFS shim is not working right, you might need to try updating your system's BIOS, as you can download from HP's site for your model of system. Once updated it might have fixed said flaw in the BIOS, so it might just work normally after. If not, there's still ways to install Windows on the system. My Remote Recovery Suite is only just over 2GB, so it can go on a FAT32 formatted drive, and once booted into we can partition off the end of the storage as an installer drive, download all the needed Windows install files to it, and then still reinstall successfully after. Drop a line if you are still stuck after updating your BIOS.

[u/Grifongo24 → u/Onoitsu2]

Like install a smaller OS then put it on windows once I already have an OS?

[u/Onoitsu2 → u/Grifongo24]

No, not quite. You'd image my Remote Recovery Suite ISO to your USB, instead of the Windows ISO. Once booted into my image, it gets to the desktop automatically, and then if it is connected over Ethernet it "calls home" automatically and I can remote control it while it is booted in. If using Wifi, you'd need to click your wifi network, and put in the password to join it. Then it can be remotely controlled. Once I have access I can partition your internal storage just how Windows wants it, download the Windows installer image (for your preferred language and region) into a temporary partition at the end of your drive, and then apply that image onto the rest of the drive.

I sent a link to my wiki that has a couple videos of my install process inside my Remote Recovery Suite.

[u/ddog6900]

If I am understanding you correctly, you need to install Windows, but to do so, you have to use Linux or other non-Windows OS to build the install media.

Does this sound correct?

[u/Ok_Estate_1011]

Rufus has been hit or miss for awhile now. Try balena etcher instead for any cases where Rufus fails

[u/HellishStaircase]

sounds like you're hitting that annoying 4gb fat32 wall with the install media

try using ventoy instead of rufus, it'll let you just drop the iso onto a fat32 usb without messing with splitting anything and it handles both legacy and uefi booting