How To Bootable Pendrive For Windows 10
Joao Charlesbois
I'm running into a frustrating issue where I need to create a Windows 10 bootable USB for my Macbook Pro 2023, but every attempt to use Boot Camp Assistant has ended in errors. This has left me in a bit of a bind, as I'm keen to find an alternative method that bypasses Boot Camp altogether. The goal is to successfully prepare a USB drive with Windows 10 installation files, which I plan to use on a PC. If anyone knows how to do this directly on macOS, avoiding Boot Camp issues, I'd really appreciate a simplified guide or tool suggestions to get this done.
There are many ways and tools can be used to make Windows 10 bootable USB installer on Mac, like rufus, WonderISO or Unetbootin. But for me, I used to installed windows 10 in a VM (vmware i think is what I used) on Mac and then created the USB drive from there. I wish that you had known about this method.
Bootcamp assistant app is removed from Apple Silicon on Mac so you can't create Windows 10 bootable USB on Mac with Bootcamp app. I am using WonderISO on my Apple Silicon Mac running the latest macOS Sonoma and it only takes 3 clicks to create a Windows 10 bootable USB on my Mac.
Parallels Desktop, a popular virtualization software for Mac, allows you to run Windows and other operating systems within macOS without needing to reboot. So you can create Windows 10 bootable USB on Mac in a Windows virtual machine.
Firstly, you need to have a copy of the Windows 10 ISO file. Microsoft provides this file for free on their website, intended for users who need to install or reinstall Windows. Download this file to your Mac before proceeding to the next steps.
With the Windows 10 ISO file downloaded, the next crucial step is to obtain a USB drive with sufficient storage space. Typically, a drive with at least 8GB of space is recommended. This ensures that there is enough room for the Windows installation files and any additional updates or drivers you might need to include in the bootable media.
Once Parallels Desktop is installed, you can use it to create a new virtual machine using the Windows 10 ISO file. During the setup process, Parallels will ask where you want to install Windows. At this stage, instead of installing it on a virtual disk, you'll choose your USB drive as the installation destination. This process effectively turns your USB drive into bootable Windows 10 installation media.
However, it's important to note that directly creating Windows 10 bootable USB on Mac through Parallels Desktop might not be as straightforward as using dedicated software for making bootable drives. It takes more time and storage space on your Mac.
If you want to create windows 10 bootable USB on Mac without bootcamp, you can try using a different tool called Etcher. Etcher is a free and open-source tool that allows you to create bootable USB drives from ISO files. Here are the steps to create a Windows 10 bootable USB on Mac using Etcher:
It becomes much challenging to create Windows 10 bootable USB on Mac as Bootcamp is not available on Apple Silicon Mac. Instead, you can borrow another Intel Mac and use Bootcamp to make a bootable Windows 10 USB on Mac.
Step 1: Open the Boot Camp Assistant in the Utilities folder within your Applications folder. Alternatively, use Spotlight search (Cmd + Space) and type "Boot Camp Assistant" to find and open it.
I found a way to install Windows on system without Mac OS system. You will need a USB with a Mac OS system on it. Reason why you will need to format the HD of the mac. With the system off. Turn on the mac. Access the boot up Options menu. Select the USB with the mac os. You will not be loading the Mac Os system. Don't worry. It will load to install the Mac OS system. You click the desktop and select Disk Utility. Choose the hard drive. Select Partition. Select one Partition. Under the Partition window Select Master Boot Record. This will allow you to format the hard drive that is not GUID partition that is for Mac. Once that is done. You are golden. Make sure you have a bootable USB with Windows on it. I used a bootable CD with Windows 7. When selecting the bootable media, it will load windows. You may receive error that unable to use the hard drive. No worries. Select the hard drive, delete and format. and Try again. This should allow you use the hard drive and install windows. No boot camp and no Mac OS on the system. If you need to get drivers. Try using IOBIT Driver Booster. It is free. Or you can view the devices in Device manager to locate the kind of devices that maybe needed to be updated.
@Delaney_Justin Tried this today. My commands seemed to have worked. Files were created on my USB Flash Drive, but still doesn't seem to be recognized by my new PC. Do you have ideas on how to verify that the correct files were created? Maybe I messed up the path part?
@Tonyhu2255
I got me a hand me down iMac 27" late 2015 from work and just used Ventoy to boot into HirenBootcd. From this Windows recovery environment I started an installation for W11 with the bypass method for the requirement check. I had to manually look up all the drivers and the only one that gave me trouble was the audio which I managed to fix after tons of possible options on the sound driver end.
So now I don't use bootcamp and can install all the regular Windows drivers for the hardware. It runs like a charm and I'm surprised as to how capable of a machine it is this way. It runs some emulators and games pretty good as well.
o, for the M1 chip, Boot Camp should work just fine without any additional software like Parallels. However, if you have an older model with an Intel processor (M2/M3), then using Parallels is necessary in order to run Windows alongside macOS seamlessly on your machine. As for obtaining genuine Windows keys from Microsoft Partner Hypest-key
installing WinUSB on EFI loaded Ubuntu will uninstall the grub-efi packages in order to install the grub-pc packages. It will make your system unbootable if you don't manually reinstall grub-efi package before rebooting.
After installation, write the windows ISO to your storage device with the following command. In the command below replace the X in /dev/sdX with your usb device path (see above how to find it).
Some third-party installers feature Windows installation images (/sources/install.wim) greater than 4GB making FAT32 as target filesystem impossible. NTFS filesystem support has been added to WoeUSB 3.0.0 and later.
Now look for gparted in the Dash or type gparted in the terminal. Select your USB stick from the right dropdown list. In my case it's /dev/sdg, yours may be different. Remove all partitions and create a single big FAT32 partition with Gparted.
Once that is done, unplug and plug your USB stick so it gets mounted (you can also mount it from the same GParted), now execute Unetbootin, again, you can look in the dash or typing in the terminal. Select that you want to use an iso, look for the path your ISO is.
Mark the checkbox to see all devices, here you have to select the very same device you selected in Gparted, otherwise your data can be lost. Select continue. Wait for a moment and done. Restart your pc and select to boot from the USB.
This method will work also with [new] versions of Windows 10, where there is a file, install.wim, with a size > 4 GiB, so that the FAT32 file system cannot manage it, when extracted from the iso file. In this case there will be a small FAT32 partition and a bigger NTFS partition. It is tested with an early version of Windows 11, and works there too.
It was difficult to find a linux tool that can create boot drives (USB sticks, memory cards ...) with Windows, so I added this feature to mkusb-nox and later on created mkusb version 12 with this feature. It works in all current versions of Ubuntu (and Ubuntu flavours: Kubuntu, Lubuntu ... Xubuntu) and with Debian 8-10. The created boot drive can boot 64-bit Windows in both UEFI and BIOS mode.
The advantage of this method is that it depends only on Microsoft's tool, which does the configuration for you. The latest Windows images contain a file above FAT32's size limit, which makes it a pain to create a bootable USB drive by hand. My WoeUSB-created drive wasn't recognized by my Dell XPS's UEFI.
WinUSB comes with a simple GUI with minimal options to go with, here is how to use WinUSB to make bootable Windows USB from Ubuntu. You can use any Windows ISO may be for XP, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1 or any other.
This mode is made for custom installation disks with install.wim file greater than 4 GiB, which could be found on various torrent trackers. Windows2usb creates 2 partitions in this mode, small 1 MiB FAT32 partition with uefi-ntfs and huge NTFS partition with ISO data.
The easiest way that I know is using Ventoy.
You can get Ventoy in this web site
You just need to install Ventoy to the USB stick and Ventoy allows you to drag and drop the image files that you want to add to the USB stick and it creates a grub like menu that allows you to choose the system you want to boot from your USB stick. It can be done with many different operating systems, including Windows and Linux distributions.
In addition to being easy, Ventoy is very practical. You can find the instructions on how to use it on the website.
For the sake of completeness, let me add instructions on how to create a bootable USB-disk from ThinkPad's UEFI/BIOS update ISOs. None of the above answers worked for me. (Perhaps there are similar problems with other vendors.)
Update for 2023 using Ubuntu 22.04LTS desktop and creating a Windows 10 installation bootable USB; I doubt very much the 17 other answers missed this, so I think it must be much easier in 22.04 than it was in previous Ubuntu versions. Please note that this approach requires that your system (Bios) can boot into a NTFS formatted drive. If that's not the case, look at the other answers below. You may be able to find out if your hardware can boot into NTFS by looking at its documentation. Older hardware will likely not be able to boot into NTFS, and even some newer ones as the comments show.
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