26

By udisk, I mean a 2.5 inch HDD placed in an External Hard Drive Enclosure

I'm quite familiar (not professional, daily use only) with Linux (Arch&Ubuntu) but newbie to Windows. Sometimes I accidentally kill my Windows installation with some silly yet unrecoverable operations, and I have to:

  1. Download Windows 10 iso image
  2. Borrow a PC w/ a working Windows installation from someone.
  3. Install Ultraiso on that computer.
  4. Create Windows 10 installation udisk w/ Ultraiso and iso image.
  5. Boot my computer w/ the udisk.
  6. Repair/Reinstall my Windows 10.

I'm tired of borrowing computers or preparing extra udisks. Is there any way to create a Windows installation udisk w/o Windows, w/ Linux only?

Unacceptable solution:

  • dd if=[XXX.iso] of=/dev/sdX - There is no way it's ever gonna work
  • Install Ultraiso on Windows VM, create a virtual disk, flash iso to virtual disk w/ Ultraiso in VM, then binary dump virtual disk to my udisk - Too much trouble

Possible solution:

  • Manually set up ISOLINUX/GRUB2/etc. on udisk and extract iso (If so,a thorough tutorial is much appreciated)

3 Answers3

44

The best way to do that currently is to use woeusb

woeusb  --target-filesystem NTFS --device path/to/windows.iso /dev/sdX

There is also a GUI for those that prefer it.

Community
  • 1
Mathieu Westphal
  • 968
3

I did some search, and found a perfect script: windows2usb.

Since woeusb doesn't support UEFI, this tool supports BIOS and UEFI(with rufus driver), FAT32 and NTFS.

recolic
  • 629
-4

I wonder what makes you think you have to do that ever? Downloading the iso takes as much time as simply repairing it with an older iso and then redownloading the updates again. Just put an old 4GB USB Stick with a windows installation somewhere and forget about it, it's not like you would save any time creating it again and again. You can update when a big update comes out, unless you destroy your windows installation every day.

SchnitzlKlopfa
  • 48