The Computer Oracle

How to avoid "Windows cannot open the required file D:\Sources\Install.wim" when installing Windows 10 from USB drive?

--------------------------------------------------
Hire the world's top talent on demand or became one of them at Toptal: https://topt.al/25cXVn
and get $2,000 discount on your first invoice
--------------------------------------------------

Music by Eric Matyas
https://www.soundimage.org
Track title: Mysterious Puzzle

--

Chapters
00:00 How To Avoid &Quot;Windows Cannot Open The Required File D:\Sources\Install.Wim&Quot; When Installin
00:50 Accepted Answer Score 16
02:11 Thank you

--

Full question
https://superuser.com/questions/1508503/...

--

Content licensed under CC BY-SA
https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/lice...

--

Tags
#windows10 #usbflashdrive #windowsinstallation #windowsinstaller

#avk47



ACCEPTED ANSWER

Score 16


In older versions of Windows 10, install.wim was smaller than the FAT32 file system 4GB maximum file size. Thus various people created applications and how-to articles that use a USB drive formatted with FAT32.

Then, sometime around 2018, install.wim grew to exceed the FAT32 limit. In Windows 10 version 1909, file install.wim is 4.6GB. Surprise! Even if install.wim is present, it is truncated to 4GB and therefore invalid. Now all those nice applications and instructions that people wrote in the past no longer work.

The NTFS and ExFAT file systems can handle large files--if you are lucky, your BIOS might support NTFS, but the UEFI standard mandates only FAT16 and FAT32.

The solution is to create two partitions. The first is a FAT32 partition containing an NTFS driver. This is used to access the big files on a second NTFS partition.

The Rufus application on Windows automatically creates such a two partition USB installation drive. I used it and it worked. I gave up on MacOS because it cannot write to NTFS without a special driver.