NTDEV, the developer behind the popular tiny10 and tiny11 projects, has released a new creation called live11. It is the first bootable Windows 11 live DVD designed to run entirely on RAM and fit on a 4GB virtual hard drive (VHD).
live11 works like any other Windows live CD (or DVD/USB). You can burn the ISO to a USB or optical drive (if you want to do it the old way) and boot the OS without installing it on your HDD or SSD. After that, you get a fully working Windows 11 suitable for troubleshooting, data recovery, virus removal, or other tasks.
You can download NTDEV's live11 from the Internet Archive, but mind the following limitations before using it:
- Booting live11 requires 8GB of RAM, even though the project uses only half of that.
- live11 does not work on systems with UEFI and GPT (GUID partition table)—only MBR and BIOS are currently supported.
- If you want to try live11 on a virtual machine, only VMware and Hyper-V work (VirtualBox will get stuck in a boot loop).
NTDEV plans to address the dominant issues and deliver other improvements in future updates, so expect a better version of live11 soon. Although the first release looks more like a proof of concept, seeing a fully working Windows 11 on a 4GB live DVD is still an impressive achievement.
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