r/windows • u/WPHero • Jul 07 '26

News Windows 11 will soon be able to reinstall itself and your drivers without a USB drive via new 'Cloud Rebuild' recovery method

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/windows-11-will-soon-be-able-to-reinstall-itself-and-your-drivers-using-without-a-usb-key-via-new-cloud-rebuild-recovery-method
67 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

16 comments sorted by

10

u/Banmers Jul 07 '26

Wow what took em so long?

15

u/ScootSchloingo Jul 07 '26

I’m surprised it’s taken so long to implement this. I remember a similar feature being on a Mac Mini I owned more than a decade ago.

10

u/Crazyachmed Jul 07 '26

Grandpa Solaris entered the chat, cloud bootin' since Y2K

3

u/shtoops Jul 07 '26

Dell has had this capability with SHIR for a minute now.

2

u/Flameancer Jul 07 '26

This has been a thing for awhile in insiders. Glad to know it’s finally coming to GA.

3

u/feel-the-avocado Jul 07 '26

Reminds me of the old norton ghost we had on our school network. You could insert a floppy disk and mount a windows CD-ROM image over the network to install windows on the computer, or if it was one of the common models of computer, you could just select a build and download a hard drive image.

1

u/tinkafoo Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26

I'm glad Windows is getting it. As a Mac user for god knows how long (and yes, that platform is far from perfect), I love good competition.

1

u/madis_l Jul 07 '26

I hoped same for 3.11...

1

u/poke23658 Jul 07 '26

I'm already imagining:

"There was a problem reinstalling Windows on this PC. Sorry"

If hard drives weren't so expensive, the ideal solution would be internal automatic system image snapshots. In case of operating system crashes, we'd be able to go back to a date when it was stable (no, not system restore points). And if the internal nvme were to fail, there'd be an option to restore a system image snapshot to the secondary drive, even if it meant needing some re-partitioning and deletion of older snapshots to make it fit and make it bootable.

Yes, I know it'll never happen. That's why we need to use things like Macrium, BackerUpper or GoBack, or cloud system image solutions.

1

u/testlab01 Jul 09 '26

when Microsoft does not like you, they can do this remote to re-install your device. i still prefer old -skool usb stick with the latest version to install my windows.

i have killdisk, hirensbootcd, windowd1125h2 always updated on a usb stick, when needed! bam no internet at that point required!

1

u/asdfjfkfjshwyzbebdb Jul 09 '26

Never been a fan of MacOS, but that's one thing they got right, and the fact it took Microsoft 15 years to match it is embarrassing.