Sounded really interresting until I saw that this thing was vibecoded.
Imagine something as potentially destructive as software for wiping and installing an OS being AI generated!
this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2026
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What the hell. I sure ain't letting a Python script in Alpha stage written with Claude mess with my PC's partitions. You can totally create a small FAT32 partition yourself, get the ISO's content in there and boot from it. No USB key required.
Also the take that it's not Free Software if you're buying a USB key is so plain wrong. It's free as in freedom, not free beer. You still get to pay for the hardware, but with free software you get to own it too.
Yeah the "free operating system" stuff is wrong af. The guy clearly doesn't understand what free software means.
What do the F and L stand for in FLOSS?
"Free" and "libre". But this has only ever referred to the software itself, not to the hardware needed to use it.
That should be obvious, since otherwise almost no OSS would be FLOSS. After all, you have to buy a PC or another device to run it
i agree - the last letter in FLOSS stands for software, and everything before that is describing qualities of that software. the term has nothing to do with hardware per say in my opinion.
Do yourself a favor and get a USB stick with Linux on it, regardless of whether or not you are going to use it to install Linux.
When stuff breaks, you'll regret not having a bootable media like that. Also, if you are using windows and Bitlocker (the default these days), then be sure to store your encryption keys somewhere, where you can easily access them. Otherwise you won't be able to access your Windows drives
Moreover, put Ventoy on a usb stick, then copy in your ISO file(s).
You'll gain:
- ability to simply copy-paste ISO files onto USB without needing to "burn" anything
- ability to select from any number of different images at boot time, from a nice menu even
- ability to create a separate partition on the USB stick for permanent storage
On windows if you don't disable bitlocker, then login at least once to your outlook.com account so it can backup the key.
If you don't want to do that, install Linux instead.
I do tend to find the native recovery tools for an os to be better suited, so one Linux live cd, and one windows installer or pe recovery tool.
On windows if you don’t disable bitlocker, then login at least once to your outlook.com account so it can backup the key.
That's not a bad idea, but if you are going to be using Linux then I'd recommend exporting the key and, for example, saving it in your password manager and/or on a USB stick (preferably after encrypting it). That way you can easily decrypt the partition using dislocker. Also, personally, I do not want to my encryption keys to shared with Microsoft, but that's just me ¯\(ツ)/¯
always thought it would be fairly simple to have a Windows program that setup a temporary boot to a Linux ISO that gets stored to RAM. (So that the drive can be wiped for install as needed) Debian based distro ISOs (or maybe just Ubuntu idk) load to RAM with "toram" kernel parameter.
Repartitioning is only the first step. How do you add a boot entry?
I used some chinese partition tool to rearrange my partitions years ago that did this. It was sketchy as fuck but it worked where I couldn't find another tool that would do what I needed. Can't remember exactly what the problem was but something to do with moving/extending the windows partition that the usual ones I knew of wouldn't do.
New strat for migrating unattended laptops at the office just showed up!
I once tried a bit, to make an extra partition for an installer and failed.
It's neat being able to easily do so, but not worth using AI generated stuff for it.
I was running netboot.xyz to the same effect until they stopped updating their images.