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I have three computers, a Win7 laptop, a Mac and an Ubuntu box. The Win7 laptop has just died and to try to get it running again I have to run various Win7 apps, like HDScan and Intel's raid manager IAStorUI, but I can't get Windows to load.

How do I create a CD or a USB stick that will boot into a Windows GUI? My rescue disk lets me run command prompt commands, but not any app that needs a GUI.

I have looked at Oracle's virtual box and there seems to be a release called portable-virtualbox but I need Windows to run the install exe.

Are there any other solutions? e.g. iso images I can just burn to disk?

This question had been marked as a duplicate of Windows OS on external hard drive, but for new potential answerers, my situation is different from that question and is not covered by the answers there. To clarify:

  • I need a solution that I can set up using either Mac or Ubuntu, because I do not have a functional Windows OS anymore.

  • Anything like Win2Go or Windows to Disk does not help because I can't run them.

  • GRUB does not provide a solution for creating a bootable Win7 USB stick.

  • Neither does installing VMware on Linux mint.

  • BartPE is no longer available.

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  • @Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007 The point of the question is that I need to be able to create the Win7 system on the USB key on a non-Windows OS, either OSX or Linux. The other questions you found don't specify this and all their solutions are exclusively Windows-based, needing software that runs on Windows, which I can't do. So please can you un-mark this as duplicate?
    – Adam
    Sep 28, 2016 at 16:38
  • It comes down to this, it's the same question (whether the existing answers are useful to you or not), hence it's a dupe. Specific to the question at hand: Windows doesn't like being installed on a portable drive, unless you use Windows To Go, or some hack-job which may or may not be able to be done from Linux/Mac. As several other (valid) answers point out, you're easiest bet (short of using Windows To Go) is probably to install Windows into a VM that you store on the HDD and then use the appropriate compatible hypervisor for each OS (ie: VirtualBox has flavors for each of your target OSs). Sep 28, 2016 at 16:47
  • You can always request if be reopen and folks will vote and it may get reopened if enough people thinks it's worthy of having a separate question. Or better, take some of your rep and place a bounty on the existing question, requesting more Mac/Linux-centric answers Sep 28, 2016 at 16:48
  • @Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007 it is not an exact duplicate of an existing question. It is more specific, precisely because the existing answers on the more general questions were not useful to me. I don't think placing a bounty on the question with instructions for a more specific answer would be any more constructive than asking my question as I did. It would be useful if you could turn that comment into an answer - 'using an appropriate compatible hypervisor'
    – Adam
    Sep 28, 2016 at 17:12

1 Answer 1

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Use dd. Example: dd bs=4M if=imagefile.iso of=/path/to/flashdrive

The bs command speeds up the process by allowing it to use a larger buffer size, if is the input file, aka the image you are reading from, and of is the output file, aka the flash drive. On Linux the flash drive would be something like /dev/sdb or sdc. Make sure you have the correct hardware point and not the system drive, and make sure to dd to the root of the drive, not a partition. For example, using dd will work if of is sdb, but it won't be boot able if you use sdb1.

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  • A GUI front end is a key requirement in the question.
    – fixer1234
    Sep 29, 2016 at 3:55
  • Didn't see that part. Ubuntu comes with a graphical disk image writer out of the box. Click the Ubuntu button and type disk image and it should be the first application that shows up.
    – milkman
    Sep 29, 2016 at 3:57
  • Any idea if it is possible to find an iso image of Win7 that I could use? I wouldn't know if it's even possible to create an iso image of the Win7 that would work on any other drive than where it was created.
    – Adam
    Sep 29, 2016 at 9:07

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