Ventoy causing microwin iso installer to not detect drive controllers

[tuono21]

Despite microwin's recent removal, I thought I should mention that I'd discovered isos that I was making with microwin were failing at drive selection much of this year (no drives available - sata or nvme). I remembered that I updated my ventoy drive somewhere in that timeframe so tried a further update which didn't help. The ventoy project does have some mentions of related issues that they may have tried to fix... but I finally tried going back to a regular thumb drive and the microwin isos just worked as expected... I tried multiple ventoy 1.0.x versions and they all failed with microwin isos despite standard MS isos working. ?

Also, I swear I noticed some difference when using powershell 5 Vs the latest update 7 but can't recall the details... When I ran microwin (mid-jan or so version) using powershell 5 and copying the iso to usb drive with rufus (removing all windows mod options within rufus) the isos I made just worked. I've been using this midish january iso and thumbdrive successfully on a few systems and haven't updated it.

I haven't tested with the latest updates to winutil/microwin in the last couple weeks but just something to throw out there in case someone still wanted to use microwin a bit more until it's replacement arrives.

[MattNorthOfficial]

I can attest to this as well.

Rufus seems to work well with both regular Windows ISOs and Microwin.

Ventoy seems to work with regular Windows ISOs but NOT Microwin.

This should be looked into.

[radix303]

Thank you. Now I know that it wasn't my fault or that I did something wrong. I didn't think it could be Ventoy's fault.

[tuono21]

Ventoy has become so ubiquitous that it took me more hours than I'm comfortable admitting to figure this out!

Additionally, I also verified that Powershell 7 did cause issues with the microwin scripts. For whatever reason, creating a microwin iso with PS7 causes the windows installer to create the first three partitions (boot/uefi, reserved, and windows) taking the whole disk leaving no space for the recovery partition. Then at the end of the install, right before the first reboot, it will fail with "could not update computers boot config. Install cant proceed) If you reboot anyway, it'll blue screen at the very start with a BCD error. This is running from a thumbdrive without ventoy to avoid the initial issue with the installer.

I forked and modded the microwin script to add cumulative updates so that MAY be to blame here with ps7 but just using the default powershell 5 results in a perfectly working microwin iso.... at least up through the "microwin 2026" commits at the end of january.

[radix303]

With the new Win11 Creator, installation via Ventoy works again.