Update
I’ve archived the .iso file described on this page here for download.
Well, I’m surprised this worked. Rufus will make a USB installer for Windows 11 that automatically bypasses checks for system compatability and I’d made one of those awhile ago, and, it had worked on a couple of older computers. So, I was running Mint 20 and I’d installed VmWare 16. I wondered if there was a way I could install Windows 11 in a virtual machine and started tinkering. This is a recap of what I did that worked:
- I downloaded a 64-bit, Windows 11 iso from Microsoft and just tried to use that as an installer. It asked for a key, which I didn’t have, so that was a bust. Plus, I’m sure it would have failed to any system compatability checks.
- I insterted my hacked, USB installer into my PC and looked at the files on the USB stick. There was an EFI partition and, also, a partition with the actual Windows 11 files. I made a folder on my desktop and just copied the Windows 11 files to this new folder. I didn’t copy anything from the EFI partition.
- I used an old Windows program called UltraIso to open the .iso I had downloaded from Microsoft and deleted all of the files – then I just copied the files from my hacked version into the file and saved the thing. I know very little about tech. I just used the downloaded .iso file as I thought it would preserve the correct architecture for an .iso file – actually, I don’t have a clue.
- VMware 16 doesn’t even offer an option, in it’s drop-down list, to install Windows 11 after youv’ve chosen to install a Windows operating system. I simply chose the Windows 10 option (not the 64-bit version) and figured it would flop – but, hey, what the hell…right?
- In a nutshell, it worked perfectly
Random Notes
I ran the MAS activator and also ran a program that deletes Windows Defender – and everything still worked. Even though I did this in an old HP EliteDesk computer it does have 32-gig of RAM. I allocated 2 cores of the processor almost 6 gig of RAM to the virtual machine.
See It Running
Okay….this is real time, nothing sped up or messed with – I did remove a few frames where I inadvertantly opened a private web page. I play a video in VLC and scrub through some YouTube videos- there is one, single instant of audio latency in the first YouTube video but bear in mind that I am simultaneously running Mint 20, VmWare 16 with Windows 11, and, SimpleScreenRecorder (a Linux screen recorder like Camtasia) in full screen mode – and all of this on about an $80.00 computer that is 12 years old.
But this as it happened – Windows 11 ran very smoothly even with Linux running a screen capture program in the host system – which, given my hardware, is just crazy. Without something like SimpleScreenRecorder runnin in Linux, of course, the Windows 11 virtual machine runs slightly better.