How to: F*ck up, not installing win 10: "How a 10 sec boot time, forced me to use linux"

Storytime: Yesterday I was bored of my 300ish games on steam. Re-booting my win 10 pc. (i7 9700k 4.7mhz Acore,z390 prime -a, 3000mhz cl15,rtx 2060).

I read online about optane. Hmm could this speed up my drive? I think about “My pc taking almost 2 minutes to reboot”. I check my “time in bios” under startup. 12sec… uhhh Could it be ANY slower?
I decide to read the manual/instructions for optane memmory. Apparently I need to have my drives in GPT mode(not MBR) for partitions to work with an optane drive. Maybe using UEFI instead of legacy my pc might boot faster, so i thought.
I happen to figure out that you can losslessly convert a partition to that format using a “new” (to me) feature mbr2gpt.exe that some nice person at MS added to the operating system. SO i convert it. Everything went fine. I change to UEFI in bios. And, my boot time is now 20SEC!! WhAT? this is not what i wanted.
Now i notice that I have a partition on (not C:\ drive) that also has a partition that is used for “boot manager”. So i delete it. You might see where this is going?
I restart. fine. Same slow boot. Then i figure. maybe mbr2gpt.exe “left” the old legacy partition? oh no. Me tired and excited delete the partition for C:\ “recovery” the one that is used for BOOTING at all. Now win 10 does not have a “space” to boot. I’m fucked.
Easy fix? I can just DL win 10 iso and reinstall? Not for me… I have a usb key with 4GB memory. And apparently iso size is 16GB?
So i use it to install PoPOS and google how to “recover the partition” and what ended up happening is that I use gparted and test disk to overwrite my C:\drive that was previously only missing a partition space for booting to now being completely wiped.
Now I’m sitting here and wondering if I’m stuck with using Linux until I can get another USB to fit win 10 iso on.
(the reason is that i used win 7 disk to install and upgrade to win 10) and with my dad throwing away my “dumb” keyboard that can be “handed over” from UEFI to OS while booting from CD in legacy mode, makes me unable to use the CD. (I have no other keyboard).
So I you read this far, does anyone know if it is possible to install part of “minimum” copy of ISO for win 10 on a 4GB usb stick? or directly to a drive? Using linux of course.
If not I guess I’m stuck here on POPos unable to play Cyberpunk, unless I buy a USB (if that works with keyboard to install) or worst case, i need a new keyboard and a new copy of win 10…

If you go to the Microsoft Media Creation Tool web page you can download the W10 image and it weights 3GB so you should be able to create a bootable USB with a 4GB stick. You can also ask a friend to burn you a DVD with the image since WMCT allows for DVD versions of the OS.

If the Microsoft page doesen’t allow you to download the ISO open the inspect page on Chrome, change the user agent to iPad and it will let you download the image no problem.

P.S. 12s boot time is absolutely normal for W10. I have fast boot disabled and that’s what I’m getting. When I was using an HDD with the NVME boot drive I was past 20s boot time consistently. So I think getting a chep QLC drive for your games is the best option you have.

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Thanks for the help. I went and bought a 32gig usb. going to try now.

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