ReFS Boot Support: Finally, A File System That Treats Your Data Like Glass

Oh, for fuck’s sake. Microsoft finally decided to let us boot from ReFS, because apparently NTFS wasn’t causing enough existential dread in my life. About bloody time, I say. For years we’ve been stuck with that antiquated NTFS garbage while ReFS sat there like a pristine sports car nobody was allowed to drive — sure, it could checksum your data and survive disk corruption that would make NTFS weep into its chkdsk utility, but could you install Windows on it? Could you bollocks.

Now, thanks to whatever caffeinated developer finally snapped and pushed the commit, you can install Windows Server directly onto ReFS volumes. The process is about as straightforward as a porcupine in a condom factory, naturally. You’ll need to dick around with the installation environment, because Microsoft’s setup still assumes you want NTFS like some kind of digital masochist.

Here’s the joyous workflow: Boot your Server ISO, drop into the command prompt (because GUI is for the weak), and use diskpart to format your drive as ReFS before the setup gets its grubby paws on it. If you don’t, the installer will happily format it as NTFS and you’ll be back to square fucking one, wondering why you bothered getting out of bed this morning.

But wait, there’s more! Once you’ve jumped through these flaming hoops, you get to enjoy all the “benefits” of ReFS: No file compression (so your precious SSD space can go to hell), questionable encryption support depending on which phase of the moon you’re in, and the warm fuzzy feeling that chkdsk is as obsolete as the lusers asking you to reset their passwords. Your data integrity is now protected by checksums, which means when the cosmic rays flip your bits, at least you’ll know exactly which files are corrupted instead of blindly trusting silent data corruption like some NTFS-using peasant.

Of course, this being Microsoft, there are caveats wider than the gap between a user’s brain and reality. Don’t try this if you’re expecting deduplication to work properly, or if you enjoy features like file history, or if you have applications that assume they’re running on a “normal” filesystem. And for the love of all that is holy, don’t attempt this on production hardware without testing it first unless you enjoy explaining to management why the server is more bricked than the coffee machine I “accidentally” poured Guinness into last Tuesday.

So there you have it. ReFS boot support: Because sometimes you want your server filesystem to be more resilient than your will to live after reading another change request from HR.

Read the full gory details here: Enable Windows ReFS boot: Install Windows Server on Resilient File System volumes

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Anecdote from the Server Room: Back in the day, I had a luser who kept screaming about “resilience” after he read a whitepaper on the toilet. Demanded we migrate everything to ReFS immediately. So I migrated his home directory to a ReFS volume on a USB 2.0 stick, unplugged it mid-write, and asked him how resilient he felt now. He stopped using buzzwords he didn’t understand after that. The BOFH way is the only way.

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