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I'm deleting my Windows 10 update and want to perform a clean installation. Like many others, I'm going to install it from my usb drive. I've the iso and using Rufus to create the bootable drive. Well, my question is which file system I'll choose to format it before burning? I watched a video on youtube where the guy used NTFS but didn't say anything about it. But I want to keep it in FAT32. Is it really necessary to use NTFS?
Abrar Borno
Posted 2016-08-14T08:40:29.510
Reputation: 247
@Ramhound -- that's not exactly true. UEFI has no problem booting from NTFS (or any other file system) as long as the relevant file system driver has been loaded. The UEFI specs mandate FAT32 to always be present, but some firmwares do provide a native NTFS UEFI driver, and Rufus can also create bootable flash drives that loads an NTFS driver to boot an NTFS partition if needed. So FAT32 is not required -- NTFS will work just as well for a drive created with Rufus. [disclaimer: I am the author of Rufus] – Akeo – 2016-08-14T12:48:28.210
Yeah, but you can create a small FAT32 partition that loads an NTFS driver and voila, NTFS boot from UEFI. And as I mentioned, some firmwares (e.g. intel NUC, some Gigabyte, etc.) have native NTFS driver support, and those are becoming more and more common, so your statement that UEFI "requires" FAT32 is already factually incorrect for those. If you have a NUC and copy a Windows ISO to an NTFS partition, it will boot in UEFI mode without problem.
– Akeo – 2016-08-14T20:53:45.893Furthermore, in most cases, it's not that difficult to add an NTFS driver to your existing firmware, to achieve direct NTFS boot from UEFI.
– Akeo – 2016-08-14T20:58:19.427