Now that I have that all done, and an itty-bitty little hard drive left over than I don't need, it has become my new lab monkey, something I can use and abuse for my own education and entertainment. And I am messing around with third party (third person?) image deployment tools, namely Flashboot, Rufus, and one called "Coolinstall" that was written and posted by another member of one of my forums, each of which does something interesting that the others can't.
And here is what only Rufus does that is interesting, it has a neat formatting option, it's BIOS/MBR format also supposedly works for booting EFI. And the way they did it is very cool. The "EFISECTOR" (fat12) partition is at the END of the physical disc, not the beginning, like they usually are. And the boot sector (physical disc sector "0", partition table and MBR) has a "press any key to boot from USB" feature like the "boot.bin" on the windows installation DVD. Also, sector 6 is supposed to be reserved for a backup copy of sector 0, but in this case, there is a conventional, no "press any key" boot sector there. I presume that is so anyone who knows WTF they are doing (who have Winhex, and not afraid to use it!) can use either one. Too bad I can't get a fresh install on this machine (they always fail half way through, for one reason or another, win 11 reported that it can't be configured to run on it, win 10 just reboots over and over, right after "select language and timezone"), so I can only use systems that were originally installed on another machine (my flashdrive, and the HDD out of my now dead laptop).
The 3 programs I am using deploy windows from windows, they aren't supposed to be bootable, like the windows setup DVD. However, I built a cool windows PE build, PE being the bootable system on said windows DVD, just for GP, so I adapted that to run those, and substituted it for the standard one on the DVD with a menu GUI, and threw in the windows 11 (the original that came with win 11, YUCK!!!), and the one from an older version of Win 10 (not sobbishly picky about what it will install on), just because I could. I can also run a bunch of other useful tools, even more than "Hirren's" boot disc, I know, because I took all of them, and added a few of my favorites, for my own use (like winhex, diskgenius, and the "Aomei" boot disc, which Hirren's started out with), and that is what I now consider to be the perfect windows installation disc. I had lots of fun with that. Anyway, that's how I've been able to get away with installing 10 and 11 onto MBR discs. I just wish I could get EasyBCD to run under windows PE, that's the last big bump in my road.