Like you it used to drive me crazy and would often doesn't work but I never had issues after doing this.
I mean it's easy enough to try for yourself if you do not believe my own experience.
This is different from the Linux situation, in which a file's name and directory location are separate from its inode, or the data structure holding actual information about the file including where the data lives on disk: once the inode associated with a file name is looked up and the file opened, anything may be done with the file name, including changing or unlinking it. Inodes with no links will also only be freed once every open file descriptor on the unlinked inode is closed. So a process will keep on chugging even if its executable file on disk is deleted, as though nothing happened -- because the file itself is only deleted once its inode is closed and unlinked.
When I built my new PC I also spent a couple of hours on it, because most of the old documented and simple solutions did not work.
When I had a big partition that could hold the image the system wouldn't want to boot from it. On the small Fat32 partition the image didn't fit.
I think in the end I had to create 2 paritions, a Fat32 and an ExFat one. Then I had most of the boot files on both, but the big windows image only on the ExFat one.
That actually works - when the installer can't find the big image on the original partition you can point it to the other one and the installation will continue.
Although now this is even easier if you commonly are installing a new OS. But for the typical enthusiast that installs a new OS every couple years this solution is overkill.
> UEFI:NTFS is a generic bootloader, that is designed to allow boot from NTFS or exFAT partitions, in pure UEFI mode, even if your system does not natively support it. This is primarily intended for use with Rufus, but can also be used independently.
AND.... anyway it very often doesn't even work. Many UEFI BIOS are very opinionated about what they consider bootable.
This is a slick solution, but I think the average person it would be easier to just copy paste the files from the iso onto a usb and call it a day.
I think it was WoeUSB that finally worked for me, not plain dd or Rufus or Apple's Boot Camp utility. Ventoy looks impressive, but unfortunately too many tools don't work.