Windows – How to create bootable Windows 8 iso image in Linux

Well this was better a VirtualBox and Windows issue.

I had an other Win7 virtual machine, I added a virtual disk. I copied the necessary files according to

http://www.instructables.com/id/Install-Windows-7-without-USB-or-DVD-without-upgra/

and made it bootable.

Then I created a new virtual machine whose sole disk was this newly created bootable drive.

I could then boot this new VM and the Win7 installation started.

This did not solve my original problem but this is an answer to my above question. Although not by Unix means but I was able to create a hard disk that boots the contents of the install DVD iso image.

I tried the Win7 solution described by Microsoft on a Windows machine:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/windows-usb-dvd-download-tool

and obtained the

0x80080005 error

so went to Debian Stretch 9 to try to build the Windows 10 bootable USB using a e5.onthehub.com college/school ISO.

Using dd absolutely doesn't work for Windows 10. This only works for Linux OSes. Use:

dd if=my-linux-os.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M

Note: Never try write to /dev/sdX1 where X={a,b,c or d} and always check you are not overwriting your hard disk which is usually /dev/sda or /dev/sdb!

For Windows 10 you can use WoeUSB but not from the apt/yum repos. These ones are obsolete, at least for Debian 9. So instead use:

git clone https://github.com/slacka/WoeUSB.git

Then follow the instructions at the end of:

https://github.com/slacka/WoeUSB

You must have all the prerequisites such as gparted and so forth installed first.

I also found at the end of the process that I must run woeusb with sudo. So you just use:

sudo woeusb --device local/of/my/windows-10-image.iso /dev/sdX

and hey presto it just works brilliantly. In my case my harddisk was /dev/sda and my USB drive was /dev/sdb so I wrote the ISO to /dev/sdb (again be careful, you don't want to overwrite your OS by accident). I then installed it on a military class MSI motherboard with 2TB hard disk attached with no fast boot options inside the BIOS and it just works. I turned on absolutely every UEFI option first to get it into the right state.

I also had problems at install time, with the system hanging forever when using a Gmail email account for login and when the internet cable was connected at the second restart of the machine (during the install process). If you have this issue, disconnect internet, restart machine, let generic account be built, login, restart with internet cable