So I happened to get ahold of an old Vaio Laptop. No recovery disk. At time of use, came with Win7.
My kids have asked for a laptop for a long time for now, and I figured this is a good shot.
However.
The Vaio is pretty old (~2018 or such), and targeted to Win7.
The bios on it appears to NOT be able to boot from other than FAT32 partitions.
Win10 images come in UDF format (some industry craze of later times apparently),
which - you guess it - cannot be picked up by the bootloader on the Vaio (needless to say, the bios is as barenaked as possible).
After excluding also PXE (my home router does not support it); it seems there is time to take a different step. How about slicing out the extras from the Win10 installation image to make it fit on a 4GB partition? In the end, it's merely 1.8 GB over that limit. Shouldn't be that hard, right?
So I found this link from Dell that tells how to slice the windows image.
However.
I have been a debian user for about 7 years now, so there is no windows machine around at my home.
So, the best solution was to get one of the Edge Virtual machines Microsoft kindly provides, and hope the tool in question ("dism") is available...and guess what? On the Win10 VM, it is!
So, downloading the latest Win10 ISO, installing guest tools on the Edge VM, sharing a folder, correcting the file access rights to basically 777 to _everything_ and splitting the install with this command:
`dism /Split-Image /ImageFile:"c:\temp\install.wim /SWMFile:"c:\temp\install.swm" /FileSize:4000`
Great. That was easy. Now we have a Win10 ISO that fits on a FAT32 partition.
Unfortunately, the Vaio still does not comply with the USB stick and just display an empty screen with a flickering cursor.
The Vaio itself is not a USB-3 device. But the stick is 2.10.
Bummer.
So the next step is, if it's not a "legacy" boot device, it can only be a UEFI one, right?
Thanks to the Alpine people, over here we have perfect instructions on how to create a UEFI-compatible boot stick.
So, in this case, reformat the stick, and re-sync all the files (this has become tedious by now hasn'it it?).
Well, same result. Bummer #2
EDIT : long story short, downloading Rufus and installing the ISO on the usb stick was the straightforward solution. Done.
For some reason, the formatting of the stick is incredible specific for these old MBR/UEFI booting machines.
