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Comment by throwaway8581 | Hacker News Reader

Do not use Rufus to make Windows 10 install media. Rufus sucks for this purpose. It uses a weird partition scheme and custom bootloader that doesn't work with secure boot.

You don't need any of this shit. Partition the drive as NTFS, mark the partition as active through Disk Management, and simply copy and paste the contents of the iso into the drive.

For maximum compatibility, just use FAT32 instead of NTFS. The official images will fit in a FAT32 volume. If you have a custom image that's more than the 4GB max file size of FAT32, and your device doesn't support ntfs or exfat, then you can use a single command to split the wim file into multiple chunks as explained here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactur...

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For simple windows installation isn't official Microsoft Media Creation Tool enough anyways? Rufus is a great tool to install ESXi, linux variants and other custom ISOs.

for some reason I can never get the media creation tool to work, it always downloads the ISO and then fails to write it to the USB with some ridiculously vague error code.

rufus on the other hand always works without issue

> Rufus sucks for this purpose. It uses a weird partition scheme and custom bootloader that doesn't work with secure boot.

Rufus also tends to format the drive strangely for *nix ISO files also. Last time I used it the write operation failed and I was stuck spending more time than necessary repairing the drive's partitions just to make it visible to my machine again. What compounds this is the documentation which can only be described as condescending and hostile.

If memory serves, there's a section in the documentation's FAQ where the author spends a paragraph first telling you that it's good your having problems with your USB drive since it will teach you a lesson. I can never understand why some documentation writers feel the need to take digs at their users. Very odd.

> The official images will fit in a FAT32 volume.

Some official Windows 10 images, as of a few years ago, no longer fit on FAT32 volumes and need to be split. The official Microsoft tool does not work on Linux, so I use WoeUSB for that, which in my experience has worked fine with Secure Boot.

Weird, for me Etcher doesn't make proper Windows bootables, and Rufus works flawlessly.

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