Or you could attach the ISO file as a virtual DVD drive in a virtual machine. Well, you could just mount the ISO as a virtual drive and run Setup from within Windows. That extra-large file would be fine for a drive formatted using NTFS, but modern UEFI-based hardware requires a FAT32 drive to boot for a clean install of Windows. The reason for the error is simple: The Windows Imaging format (WIM) file in that download, which contains the compressed files that the Windows Setup program uses for installing the new version, is a little over 4.5 GB in size, which is well beyond the 4 GB maximum file size for a USB flash drive formatted using the FAT32 file system.

Instead of completing a simple drag-and-drop copy operation as expected, File Explorer puts up this File Too Large error message:įiles larger than 4 GB won't fit on a drive that's formatted with FAT32

If you're downloading an advance release, as I was, or if you need the previous release, you'll run into an old, familiar, and extremely annoying problem. But that page only includes the latest official release. That option works fine when you download the Windows 10 installer files using the official Windows 10 Download page, because those files are packaged specifically for use on USB flash drives. Normally, that's a simple process: First, use the Recovery Media Creator to create a bootable USB flash drive then double-click the Windows 10 v2004 ISO file in File Explorer to mount it as a virtual drive and drag the contents of the mounted drive to the bootable USB flash drive. Like many IT pros with a Visual Studio (formerly MSDN) subscription, I downloaded the ISO file yesterday and set about to copy it to a bootable USB flash drive. Microsoft has made Windows 10 version 2004 available to the developer community, a couple weeks ahead of its release to the general public.

Fat32 format windows 10