I've got Windows in an ISO image and want to put it on a USB stick so I can then install window. I want to do this from Linux.
4 Answers
Use WinUSB:
WinUSB is a simple tool that enable you to create your own usb stick windows installer from an iso image or a real DVD.
This package contains two programs:
- WinUSB-gui: a graphical interface which is very easy to use.
- winusb: the command line tool.
Supported images: Windows Vista, Seven, 8 installer for any language and any version (home, pro...) and Windows PE.
- Open the ISO file with your program of choice, I prefer 7Zip.
- Make the primary partition on the thumb drive ACTIVE
- Copy all of the files present in the ISO onto the USB stick
- Boot from the USB
WoeUSB is a tool for creating a bootable USB flash drive used for installing Windows. Native UEFI booting is supported for Windows 7 and later images. WoeUSB is an updated fork of the WinUSB project.
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.
Installation
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8
sudo apt update
sudo apt install woeusb
This will install the WoeUSB graphical interface and the WoeUSB command line tool. WoeUSB supports both UEFI and BIOS for FAT32/NTFS/ExFAT USB flash drives.
To install the WoeUSB command line tool snap package in all currently supported versions of Ubuntu and other common Linux distributions that support snap packages such as Arch Linux, CentOS, Debian, elementary OS, Fedora, KDE Neon, Kubuntu, Manjaro, Linux Mint, openSUSE and Red Hat Enterprise Linux run these commands:
sudo snap install --edge woe-usb
sudo snap connect woe-usb:removable-media
To launch the woe-usb snap package command line tool run the following command:
/snap/bin/woe-usb.woeusb
If you get a permission denied
error click the Permissions button on the woe-usb screen in Ubuntu Software and toggle the permissions options from OFF to ON as shown in the below screenshot.
The WoeUSB GUI is easier to use than the WoeUSB command line tool. Click the radio button to the left of where it says From a disk image (iso), browse to the location of the Windows .iso file, under Target device select a USB flash drive, open Disks application and check that the Device name in Disks matches the Target device in WoeUSB (it should be something like /dev/sdX where X is a letter of the alphabet), and click the Install button to install to create a bootable Windows installation media on the USB flash drive.
Windows USB drive from Ubuntu failing repeatedly
WoeUSB Issues
-
The woeusb package for 19.10 hasn't landed in the ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8 repository yet. I will update this answer soon.– karelOct 18, 2019 at 7:15