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Comment by josteink

4 months ago

If you use UEFI, all you need is to copy the files from the ISO over to the USB stick.

Am I missing something?

(And the same applies to UEFI capable Linux-distros)

6 comments

josteink

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mattl  4 months ago

Windows installer images have some files too large for most tools to understand and also I believe the USB stick needs to be exFAT formatted too. Virtually any tool for making a USB stick would fail in various ways on macOS.

  • josteink  4 months ago

    > Windows installer images have some files too large … I believe the USB stick needs to be exFAT formatted

    That’s true. I forgot!

    While it’s not part of the UEFI spec many (most?) consumer BIOSes will be able to UEFI boot from NTFS as well, so formatting as that might also be an option.

    Both that and exfat should be easy to do on Linux. No idea about MacOS.

    Which brings me to

    > too large for most tools to understand

    This I don’t understand. What tools? What tools do you need beside “cp”?

    • mattl  4 months ago

      I don’t know if you can just copy the files over. It seems you also need to make the USB stick bootable?

      There’s dozens of guides on doing this on a Mac, they all seem outdated. I found a tool called WinDiskWriter on GitHub and it was the only GUI tool that worked.

      Suspect there’s more to it than just cp. There’s wimlib too for handling the larger files on the install ISO.

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