Burn bootable Windows 10 ISO image to USB stick with dd?

[linux-aarhus]

Using dd with a windows ISO will not work, and this has been known for years.

@php4fan

Do I need some other special tool to burn the iso image because it’s windows?

You cannot ‘burn’ the image to a stick.

I wrote a guide on the previous forum instance - and added it to this new instance back in septemper 2020.

→ [root tip] [How To] Use Manjaro to create a bootable Windows USB

Before the ventoy tool the only one way to create a bootable Windows ISO was to mount the iso, then format a stick with fat32 and copy the files from the ISO to the stick.

Later when the vim file exceeded 4G exfat was required.

@php4fan

Isn’t dd “agnostic” to the content of the image?

Yes it is and I think that is part of why it doesn’t work - I never managed to understand why dd is not working for this use case.

The most reasonable explanation is this comment

@LopezT

the problem is that newer windows iso’s only support ‘el torito’ mbr, which is only used for burning iso’s to a dvd or cd. For usage of a windows iso’s which is bootable from a usb drive you need an additional mbr. Linux distribution create hybrid mbr’s for years already, windows is neglecting it.

I have been stumbling over this issue by myself recently and creating a windows bootable usb media with woeusb was the solution. There are many different solutions like converting the iso on osx to a dmg and then put it onto usb with dd.

But simply writing the iso with dd to a usb media with a current windows 10 iso does NOT work, it won’t be bootable.