– Store Hiren’s PE, Gandalf’s PE, Strelec, and a custom Win10 Lite – all as .7z files on a 16 GB drive, boot any via ntboot7z menu.
title Boot Windows 10 ISO with NTBoot7z ntboot7z iso=/boot/win10.iso boot
is a specialized utility designed to boot Windows operating systems directly from compressed disk image files—specifically ISO (disc image) and WIM (Windows Imaging Format) files—without needing to extract them to a USB drive or hard disk partition. It is an evolution of the legacy ntboot tool, enhanced with native support for 7-Zip’s progressive extraction technology. ntboot7z
NTBOOT7Z alters this workflow by executing three steps sequentially at boot time:
A custom WinPE ISO or a multi-boot creator (like Ventoy or Grub4Dos). – Store Hiren’s PE, Gandalf’s PE, Strelec, and
is a specialized, niche utility primarily used in the Windows enthusiast and system administration community. It serves a specific purpose: allowing a Windows system to boot directly from a compressed archive file (specifically in the .7z or .wim format) without needing to decompress it to a hard drive partition first.
is a specialized, command-line driven tool designed to boot Windows NT-based operating systems (Windows XP through Windows 11) directly from a compressed .7z archive file without fully extracting the OS to a disk or partition. It is part of the larger grub4dos and grub2 ecosystem utilities, often bundled with bootable diagnostic CDs like Hiren’s Boot CD (older versions) , Gandalf’s PE , or Sergei Strelec’s WinPE . NTBOOT7Z alters this workflow by executing three steps
menuentry "Boot Windows 7z (CSM)" insmod part_msdos insmod ntfs set root='(hd0,msdos1)' chainloader +1
: Directly extracting a high-compression archive to an SSD is often faster than running the official Windows Setup GUI.