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Comment by chrisandchris | Hacker News Reader

If you‘re under Windows and want any stick, use Rufus. If you‘re under Linux (or Mac) and have an Iso, use dd.

At least that‘s how I do it.

WoeUSB is what you have to use on Linux to create a bootable Windows thumbdrive, dd only works for isohybrid images, and Windows isn't one.

WoeUSB hasn't been very reliable for me. I've had better results booting up a Windows VM to use Rufus with USB passthrough to the drive instead.

I'm love/hating this idea because now I want to burn a LiveUSB running Linux with a QEMU Windows VM already set up on it. I can run it live and have Windows 10 "PE" or I can install it to a host and have Windows up and running fairly smoothly without going through the OOBE.

IIRC you used to be able to make a bootable Windows stick on Linux simply by extracting the contents of the ISO onto a USB stick and marking it bootable. Is that still possible now that EFI is everywhere?

My memory is a bit hazy, but I remember dd not working for Windows images. Did you test that recently?

Some SO user mention it seems to work with dd, however I did not test that recently. Most comments seem to mention that it‘s more difficult than dd.

[0] https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/598632

Normally, for UEFI boot, you could be able just to create a FAT32 partition and copy the ISO content there. In the past, it was perfectly workable way to do so.

Except for the unfortunate install.wim file. The first releases of Windows 10 were fine, they had it under 4GB, but some of the half-year releases have it grown over 4GB, and FAT32 cannot handle that. Thus all the mitigations you see here.

The Microsoft's USB tool does not use install.wim; it contains install.esd instead. It is basically the same thing, but with different compression, so it is still a bit under 4GB. You can recompress install.wim into install.esd, if you have the inclination ...and a windows machine nearby (dism /export-image).

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