Windows – Create a bootable UEFI USB

bootmacosusbusb-flash-drivewindows 7

How do I create a bootable USB with Windows 7 SP1 64bit using OS X?

I need to setup a fresh new ASUS laptop, the only thing I have is – Macbook Pro.

What I have:

  1. Fresh new ASUS laptop with FreeDOS,
  2. An ISO image of Windows 7 SP1 64bit,
  3. An 8Gb USB flash drive,
  4. A MacBook Pro running OS X 10.9.5.

What I know so far:

  1. Creating a bootable USB drive using BootCamp is not working for me. After inserting the stick to ASUS laptop, it simply won't start the Windows setup process.
  2. There's a "UEFI" next to USB bootable option in ASUS's BIOS. This suggests I need to somehow create a UEFI-compatible bootable USB. In turn, "UEFI-compatibility" means checking 3 things which I have double-checked.

I am familiar with Terminal (being a web developer myself), so any command line tricks would be more than appreciated.

P.S. Googling isn't helping much, which is strange. This suggests I'm not googling the right keywords…

Best Answer

First of all, I'm not a Mac user, so I'm doing this purely from a Unix perspective. First of all, you need to convert the ISO file to a disk writable IMG file.

hdiutil convert -format UDRW -o ~/path/to/target.img ~/path/to/windows.iso

Then we need to unmount the USB-stick to write an image to it. To do this we need to know the device address, which can be found by running diskutil list, plug the USB stick in, then run diskutil list again to determine the device. After this, run

diskutil unmountDisk /dev/<theusbstick>

Now we are going to use the dd command to write the .img file to your USB stick.

sudo dd if=/path/to/target.img of=/dev/<theusbstick> bs=1m

Now to safely remove the USB stick to prevent data corruption, run

diskutil eject /dev/<theusbstick>

Good luck!

Source: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/create-a-usb-stick-on-mac-osx