[System] How to create bootable windows usb through Kubuntu?

[TheYikes]

Hi! Okay to begin with I'm a newbie so please bare with me.
As the title suggests I'm trying to create a bootable windows usb drive.

I've tried downloading WoeUsb. When I run woe-usb.woeusbgui from the konsole it loads but it won't allow me to select a drive.

I get the following error:

ln: failed to create symbolic link '/home/kubuntu/snap/woe-usb/21/.config/gtk-2.0/gtkfilechooser.ini': File exists

(woeusbgui:11991): GLib-GIO-WARNING **: Error creating IO channel for /proc/mounts: Permission denied (g-file-error-quark, 2)

Am I missing something, perhaps a dependencies ?

Please help.

TheYikes

[claydoh]

It actually is not hard to do without this tool, which has always been problematic

1. Format USB as GPT and NTFS
2. mount the windows iso via one of many Dolphin service menus
3. copy files from the mounted ISO to USB
4. done

Well, in theory at least.

Well, it did work last time I actually had to install Windows 10 on something. It is not working for me now.


https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/create...-usb-in-linux/

[Beerislife]

I always use Etcher to wrtie USB images

https://www.balena.io/etcher/

Official PPA

https://github.com/balena-io/etcher

[claydoh]

I always use Etcher to wrtie USB images

https://www.balena.io/etcher/

Official PPA

https://github.com/balena-io/etcher

Doesn't necessarily work on Windows ISO (UDF) images.

Sent from my LM-V600 using Tapatalk

[Beerislife]

And my unfamiriality with anthing MS shines through...

[Beerislife]

And my unfamiriality with anything MS shines through...

[jlittle]

Doesn't necessarily work on Windows ISO (UDF) images.

Indeed, Etcher says
Ark won't open them, but Linux can (at least on 20.04):

sudo mount -o loop,ro Win10_2004_English_x64.iso /mnt/win

Grub can read them too, with insmod udf, but I couldn't get grub to successfully iso boot the .efi images in the iso.

[jlittle]

I can hardly believe it, but I just booted my desktop to the windows installer from a USB I set up manually from a recent win 10 iso.

I used the method I found on Win10.guru.

I had trouble getting the firmware to recognize it as bootable; my first attempt booted a random install from an old drive I don't normally boot from, but after trying (and failing) to set up a boot entry in the set up, on the next boot the USB boot appeared. (The Gigabyte boot firmware on this desktop has always been flaky.)

Briefly,

• Using gparted, on a 8 GiB USB with an msdos partition table I made a 1 GB fat32 partition, and a NTFS partition with the rest of the space. I set the "boot" and "lba" flags on the fat32 partition, I don't know if that's necessary. The USB stick previously had a win 10 installer from sometime in 2019, and I deleted the partition.
• I mounted the iso as in my previous post.
• I copied all except the sources folder to the fat32 partition.
• I made the sources folder on the fat32 partition, and copied just sources/boot.wim into it.
• I copied all the files to the NTFS partition, including sources/boot.wim.

The copies were very slow, taking several minutes, and the boot was slow. I did not proceed to install windows, not having anywhere I could risk putting it.

[jlittle]

A follow-up... this techbit.ca tutorial is a better one to follow. My approach was janky as it maybe used bits of the previous installer on the stick. The tutorial also uses GPT and UEFI, and if I turn off legacy boot in my firmware settings the UEFI boot option appears more reliably.

The tutorial uses 7z to read the iso, rather than mounting it; I don't think that makes much of a difference, but one definitely doesn't want to use dolphin to copy files to the NTFS partition, that can be very slow.

I remounted the stick partitions with -o noatime, I'm not sure that helped. Maybe the USB I've used is old and slow.

Unmounting the fat32 partition took several minutes; I think I may have caused myself trouble by just restarting the box, which seems to cut short the flush to the drive.