Tuesday, December 14, 2021

Creating a Window 10 Live USB Stick on an Ubuntu GNU/Linux Computer

As a hardcore user of GNU/Linux systems, I don't usually come across any requirement to use Windows operating system. However recently, I had to install Windows in somebody else's computer as a help. It took me a while to find out how to prepare a installation USB drive for the purpose. Here's the steps I followed, hoping that my future self may need to refer back one day.

1. Download Window 10 ISO file from the official Microsoft website.


2. Download and install WoeUSB-ng on the Ubuntu computer using the information in the following Github page: https://github.com/WoeUSB/WoeUSB-ng


3. Run the following command to make the USB device (/dev/sdb in my case) bootable with the downloaded Windows ISO file. If there are files in the Windows 10 ISO file that are bigger than 4GB, the following command will automatically revert to NTFS format. 


sudo woeusb --target-filesystem FAT --device ~/Downloads/Win10_21H2_EnglishInternational_x64.iso /dev/sdb 

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