How to modify an installation media after being used once?

[kompre]

Hi,

I've created my installation media with an official win11 iso + rufus. After media creation I was able to simply drag and drop the autounattend.xml file into the usb and start windows installation.

Windows installation start, get blocked by a config error in the autounattend.xml (bad partition scheme), so I generate a new autounattend.xml with fixed value, but when I try to drop into the usb media installation, I can't anymore because not enough space on disk. Also the previous autounattend.xml is missing from the usb root folder where I plopped initially.

My guess is windows did something during installation, and "closed" the ability to modify the usb media installation. Recreating the media installation usb from scratch for each installation seems like an hassle, and I'm not finding any working solutions on the net.

Does somebody have any reccomendation?

[cschneegans]

There is no mechanism in Windows Setup to somehow “close” the USB drive, and you certainly can use a USB drive to install Windows to as many computers as you want.

With unattended partitioning there is a small risk that diskpart wipes the USB drive instead of your hard drive. To rule out this possibility, select the Partition the disk interactively during Windows Setup setting when you recreate the USB drive.

Another possible cause is a faulty USB drive. Try using another USB drive.

[kompre]

I have solved by using ventoy + autounattend.xml, and it worked flawlessly.

The reason I was actually stumped was the lack of IRST driver, therefore the laptop disk was not showing up for selection.

IRST driver is not something I'm familiar with and they gave me big headache to install correctly. I'm glad I switched to ventoy then because I could do quickly trial and error.

It was my first time with Autounattend.xml and I'm really impressed, is really good stuff. I hate so much that oobe...