Bootable USB

neonman

Hi all,

I've been using some flavour of Linux over the last few years ever since I built my own PC. However, I need to move over to Windows 10 for the next few months to run some labs for stuff I am studying.

I downloaded the .iso file from Microsoft for Windows 10 and used Media Writer in Ubuntu to create a bootable USB but when I reboot the PC the PC doesn't pick the USB up and boots straight back into Ubuntu. It was driving me mad as I thought it was an issue with my BIOS setup but that all looked fine when I checked so I decided to download the latest Linux Mint iso and I created a bootable USB for that and my PC picks that up fine with no issues. Any ideas? Could it be the Media Writer program just doesn't create bootable USB for Windows?

Johnboy1951

Standard Windows ISOs are not built to be bootable on USB by 'burning' them to the USB, so the usual methods fail to produce a bootable USB.

There are instructions on line to produce a bootable Win USB.


Essentially the process to create a liveUSB from a Win ISO is as follows

Create msdos partition table on USB stick
create one NTFS partition on it and format it
Set boot flag on partition
write Windows MBR to stick using ms-sys
or
write syslinux mbr to it using
dd if=/mbr.bin of=/usbstick
loop mount the Windows ISO and also mount the USB partition
Copy all files from Win ISO to stick

The USB stick should now be bootable.

If you want to then create your own image that can be used on other USB sticks you can 'dd' the USB stick to an image

dd if=/USB_Stick of=/UsbStick.img (negative aspect of this is that the resultant .img is the full size of the USB stick)

I have never tried hybridising a Win ISO to burn it directly to USB so I have no idea if it will work or not.

neonman

Thanks for the info Johnboy1951 I'll give that a go this evening after work.

bonzodog2

You might try this method too:
http://www.easy2boot.com/make-an-easy2boot-usb-drive/make-using-linux/

I haven't personally used E2B to boot a Windows image, but its supposed to be able to just drag/drop or copy/paste ISOs into the appropriate directory on the stick, rather than needing to run the setup program to add another OS

excollier

why not just install Win 10 in a VM on Linux? Virtual box or VMWare

neonman

Thanks all I got it sorted and have Win10 installed as my OS (for now)