Upgrading Win11 ARM on VMWare

[Pat Heuvel 1]

Gday,

 

For the past couple of weeks I've been seeing a message on my Windows ARM VM saying the version of Windows had expired and it was time to upgrade. Dutifully, I downloaded a new "iso", which is actually a Windows VHDX (from memory). If I mount that image (or any of a number of versions I downloaded), there is no setup.exe nor any file in the root: only the expected folders. So I tried writing the image to a 2TB external drive, using rufus. The resulting image looks the same, with no files in the root of the drive.

 

So my question (if it's not obvious) is this: is there anybody still running a current version of Windows 11 ARM on a Mac with Apple silicon using VMWare Fusion? (My version is a paid one at v13.6).

 

Regards and thanks to all!

Pat

[Pat Heuvel 1]

Update: I finally worked out that the Windows VHDX is a complete filesystem, and not an installer ISO as I had expected. I used QEMU to convert it to a VMWare VMDK, then created a VM around it. When I fired up the VM, I was presented with Windows' initial setup screen.

 

Once the setup was complete, it then pointed out that there was an even later version of Windows, which it then proceeded to download and install. So my VMWare Windows ARM is working and up to date, finally!