Well after the post on TomsHardware about running Windows 10 on a Raspberry PI I thought I would take this to the next level and put a #WindowsInsider build on my Pi that was running IOT Core!
I followed the instructions from Toms webpage and downloaded the Raspberry PI installer, generated a 18334.1 ISO, extracted the install.wim, downloaded the core package and proceeded to build myself a new Raspberry boot drive. This proved to be a challenge!
Most of the machines I was using to generate the boot disk using the WOA Installer for Raspberry PI were business computers from Lenovo and HP. These business computers use the Ricoh card readers and I believe this is where the problem existed.
When the WOA Installer would partition and format the MicroSD card as GPT, as soon as it would finish partitioning and validate the card it would error out. The reader seemed to lose contact with the SD card when multiple partitions were created and the SD card could no longer been seen in that PC. I had to move the card to another PC (Ricoh as well) and DISKPART --> Select Disk 1 (My sd Card was disk 1)--> and clean the card. After a number of failures, I pulled out my old trusty Surface Pro 2 YES a 2 - stuck the card in there and got everything moved over and the WOA worked perfectly - It has a USB 3 reader and I think this made the difference!
The speed of you SD Card is directly relational to performance on your Raspberry PI - choose accordingly! I had a couple spare SanDisk Ultra 200gb XC1 cards - my advice - Get the SanDisk extremes!
On first bootup the first part of the bootup sequence is the UEFI loader.
The UEFI loader has a full command set available for troubleshooting and issuing help with a well placed Control - C will get you a basic command list. typing Exit will get you to what I would call a BIOS level boot menu - You can change the boot order, add a SCSI Initiator, and a few other tweaks and settings. The basic menu looks like a classic BIOS Screen.
You choose the boot manager and select the SD card to boot and you are away to the races!
The PI that I have will not win any performance speed records! The install process isn't as peppy as I am used to, but the thing is that it WORKS! I ran into 2 issues, 1 small, 1 major - the first issue was that after the installation, while it is going through its whole setup, it failed to find a second keyboard.
A simple test of the USB Keyboard and I found it and the mouse was working correctly, I simply skipped by the menu to proceed with the classic Windows 10 Setup sequence we all know like the back of our hand. The 2nd major problem that I ran into was the 18334.1 build would not find the network card on board for my Raspberry PI 3, I had to skip through the screens and had to select that I had limited Internet access - account setup completed perfectly! My Pi was booted! After it booted up, I stuck in a generic RealTek Wifi USB Adapter in hopes that it would see and load drivers was unsuccessful.
The full GUI of windows 10 works, Screen snipping via Windows Shift S, Settings, Device Manager Explorer, its all there!
It is generally laggy but its acceptable for the hardware platform, if you try W10 out on any device with under 1GB of ram you will experience performance well under what you expect!
I chose to put the Windows 10 Pro on to see all the features that would be available on the ARM platform and so far it is fairly complete - The Task Manager shows the CPU usage clearly - it spikes high then levels off to ~12% on idle.
The cores and sockets are great to see show up and the device is a little workhorse, overall I was impressed with how this little engine could run Windows 10 with as much gusto as it did!
While running, I used the Snip and Sketch utility to capture screen shots, if I used it too quick it would not switch windows and crash, but if I took my time, the screen shots worked great. All in all, the user experience was adequate, sure I had no network, but a USB drive to save the images on worked great. The File Explorer gives you the same classic look, with just enough difference to know that you are running on the ARM platform.
If you notice the subtle differences in the explorer window, you will see the Program Files (Arm) directory and the WindowsARM SD card as the boot drive - When I added the USB drive to move the pictures over to a connected PC, it took 20 seconds, but it popped the drive up just like you would expect on any Windows 10 device.
In one of my recent rolls as an SCCM Imaging consultant/Architect, I got to really dig deep into the deployment of devices, how they worked with MDT and SCCM, and one of the first tests you do on a newly imaged machine is to look at the Device Manger - It shows a few gaps in some of the devices, and you can see where it detected the WIFI adapter, and where it had some troubles.
There is a list of unknown devices, all the network components except an actual physical device were there, it was actually quite a complete and mature device list for something I though we could only run IOT Core on, which is what this device was running prior to putting Windows 10 ARM on it!
I must say I am royally impressed with how it imaged the first time, sure there were a few errors, but I tell you when you pull a brand new Lenovo, HP or Panasonic Toughbook out of the box for the first time and put it on the bench to image, you usually will get a few devices that just don't show up.
Kudos to the whole team, the #windowsInsiders team, and WOA project who made this possible! Well done to make this little device work so well.
Just so that everyone could have a peek, I fired up a trusty PowerShell window and did a quick BIOS look, and I was impressed with the results
Next steps for me are to figure out how to get the network lit and do some more testing on using some neat features (Bitlocker) to make a real Windows 10 IOT device that can stand its ground out in the real world of IOT!
If you get a chance or have any questions, pop me a message @murmanz on twitter - thanks for reading and get testing on the Latest #WindowsInsider build.
Murray - www.onthewinside.com