I often find myself reinstalling Windows 11. Recently, I got a new laptop, which came with Windows Home, and some bloatware, so I wanted a fresh Windows 11 Pro install.
Drivers During Setup
Being very new, the Windows 11 setup did not have drivers for Wi-Fi adapter, so I could not get passed the network selection screen. The solution was to download the Wi-Fi adapter drivers from HP’s site, extract them, and put them on a USB drive (I made a drivers subfolder on my Windows install media).
Armed with the right drivers, before getting to network selection screen (important!), I hit Shift + F10 to open a Command Prompt, then did the following:
d:
cd drivers/wifi
pnputil /add-driver *.inf
pnputil /scan-devices
If it turns out your USB drive isn’t mounted as d:, you can use diskpart:
diskpart
list volume
Remote Desktop Login Failure
After I got Windows installed, I tried to login to the fresh install using Remote Desktop, so I could work from my primary machine while setting up the new machine in the background. I use a Microsoft account to login, and it refused to accept my password.
I’ve dealt with this before, the problem being that the target machine has never actually had my password entered, because I used passwordless login, so it apparently has nothing to validate my password-based login against.
I couldn’t remember what I had done to fix it, which was good, because I know it wasn’t this simple.
Hit Win+R, and enter:
runas /u:MicrosoftAccount\username@example.com winver
Changing the e-mail address. See CmdrKeene’s blog for more details.
You (maybe) Oughta Know 