Windows for ARM on my Raspberry PI 4b

In the previous post, I wrote that I wanted to get a Raspberry Pi 4b because I wanted to try Windows on it. It was only 2 days ago I finally made some time, and finally started tinkering with it.

Why would I want to do this?

Raspberry Pi is a fairly inexpensive Single Board Computer which makes it possible for me to test software especially software I develop on the Arm platform. Windows has support for Arm too and Raspberry is the cheapest solution to try it.

The installation process

My initial plan was to burn the Windows 10 for Arm ISO onto an SD Card, boot from it, and then install the system onto an USB flash drive.
That plan unfortunately failed, because Raspberry just wouldn’t boot from the SD Card.
Instead it was complaining that the card didn’t have a FAT filesystem.

Fortunately I found the Windows on Raspberry project! It provides a tool with a wizard, that can deploy Windows from an ISO or ESD image to an SD Card or USB drive.
This means that once you are done flashing the image you will not have to go through the entire Windows install process, only the last stage: personalizing the fresh Windows deployment.
Just like when you buy a computer with preinstalled Windows.

I could get both Windows 10 and Windows 11 to work using this tool.

You can find the Windows on Raspberry project’s official installation guide here.

The instructions there, and the wizard steps are fairly straightforward so I’m not going to cover the process in full detail.

Unfortunately the official guide doesn’t contain images about the wizard, but I can remedy that:

Observations and problems

Heating

Even with a heat sink and fans, like my setup on the picture below, Raspberry is going to be hot during installation and setup as Windows is going to make the CPU cores work a lot so don’t be surprised.

Stability

Windows on the Raspberry Pi can be quite unstable. So don’t be surprised about the ocassional system crash. I’m fairly sure it’s because of the drivers. There’s nothing you can do about it sadly.

Networking

Because of lack of drivers the Wi-Fi of the Pi will not work, so you will have to use the Ethernet port, or use an USB Wi-Fi adapter that Windows has drivers for.
However you should connect it only after finishing the installation (personalization) so that it doesn’t try to download updates during the process. It just slows it down. You can update later if you’d like.

Storage options

I used a 64 GB Samsung FIT plus flash drive, which is very small, thus doesn’t require much power AND fast. Perfect for such a use case. You should use something like this too.

Screen flickering

The screen can flicker on default settings when scrolling during the setup. I suspect this is because it doesn’t detect the screen properly.
You can remedy this by manually setting the HDMI mode in the boot options in the wizard.

For my 16:90 1920×1080@60hz display I entered these lines: