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Comment by rgovostes | Hacker News Reader

I have a sacred USB thumb drive with the Windows 10 installer on it. It is sacred because it took me hours to figure out how to make it bootable. If I recall, Microsoft's own tool for _expressly this purpose_ did not work (after having to set up a virtual machine to use it, etc. etc.), and was apparently a known problem.

I think it was WoeUSB that finally worked for me, not plain dd or Rufus or Apple's Boot Camp utility. Ventoy looks impressive, but unfortunately too many tools don't work.

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Weird I've never had a problem using Rufus to setup a bootable windows installer USB from the official ISO download. Have never tried from a VM though.

Rufus consistently for me for making a win10 USB using a Windows VM on a Linux host, after hours of trying with dd and other methods inside Linux. It's a ~2.5 mb executable which just works. And since you already have the win10 ISO to be flashed, making the VM isn't too hard.

Weird, I never had any problem with this part. And over the years I must have created bootable Windows 10 thumb drives at least 10 times

Ventoy installs special software on the removable media and from then on you can freely add or remove .iso files to its root directory whenever you please. It worked without hassle on 3 separate old laptops for me, including with the official Win10 ISO image.

It seems that the trick to make Win10 installer work is to move the executable of the tool to the USB drive you will use, then run it from there.

Like you it used to drive me crazy and would often doesn't work but I never had issues after doing this.

If the drive needs to be reformatted or the partition map changed, that doesn't seem like it would work.

Why not? Once a process is started I'd be very surprised if you couldn't delete the executable from the disk.

Windows file systems work very differently from Linux. If a file is open, Windows will put a lock on it that prevents moving or deleting the file -- and the executable image of a process is open for as long as the process runs.

This is different from the Linux situation, in which a file's name and directory location are separate from its inode, or the data structure holding actual information about the file including where the data lives on disk: once the inode associated with a file name is looked up and the file opened, anything may be done with the file name, including changing or unlinking it. Inodes with no links will also only be freed once every open file descriptor on the unlinked inode is closed. So a process will keep on chugging even if its executable file on disk is deleted, as though nothing happened -- because the file itself is only deleted once its inode is closed and unlinked.

I know it goes contrary to common sense, as we could expect a lock on the exe, but it does work.

I mean it's easy enough to try for yourself if you do not believe my own experience.

This sounds like the VM hypervisor was not correctly setup to provide the required access to your USB stick to the virtualized OS. That’s hard to fix from inside the VM.

The easiest way to make USB portable is to just copy the contents of the .iso to the stick. That’s basically all that needs to be done.

That is what users are trying to avoid -- they want to keep all their boot images on one, and not have to carry so many around.

AND.... anyway it very often doesn't even work. Many UEFI BIOS are very opinionated about what they consider bootable.

While I think this is really cool, and would have come in handy earlier in my life. Where I’m at now I don’t commonly install new OSes, and if I want to play with a new OS I’m more likely to do it in a VM. So the only time I really do a fresh install is every 5-8 years when I do a full new build.

This is a slick solution, but I think the average person it would be easier to just copy paste the files from the iso onto a usb and call it a day.

Not sure why the downvotes for you. I just did this last week and expected to have to jump through a bunch of hoops and download some software that would burn a bootable image to a usb. Nope just format it as NTFS and copy paste the files from the iso.

Although now this is even easier if you commonly are installing a new OS. But for the typical enthusiast that installs a new OS every couple years this solution is overkill.

only works if you are already using windows and therefore can use diskpart/"mark as active", or you are booting from an extended uefi firmware with the appropriate drivers (e.g. dell).

Or use something like rEFInd as intermediary firmware.

By the way, Rufus uses UEFI:NTFS [1]

> UEFI:NTFS is a generic bootloader, that is designed to allow boot from NTFS or exFAT partitions, in pure UEFI mode, even if your system does not natively support it. This is primarily intended for use with Rufus, but can also be used independently.

[1]: https://github.com/pbatard/uefi-ntfs

I formatted the stick on ubuntu as NTFS and installed it on a new sdd. No windows used during the process. Don’t know if the MSI MoBo had appropriate drivers.

This didn't work for me for Windows 10 - I tried for a few hours using all the methods I could find online, with fat32 and NTFS partitions, as well as the 'traditional' dd/cat method, and in the end only Rufus worked.

That only works if the system you're trying to boot the drive from has NTFS UEFI drivers, or if you format your drive as FAT32. Recent versions of Windows 10 cannot be copied and pasted to FAT32 drives because the system image is bigger than 4 GB.

Right - things got a lot more tricky due to this.

When I built my new PC I also spent a couple of hours on it, because most of the old documented and simple solutions did not work.

When I had a big partition that could hold the image the system wouldn't want to boot from it. On the small Fat32 partition the image didn't fit.

I think in the end I had to create 2 paritions, a Fat32 and an ExFat one. Then I had most of the boot files on both, but the big windows image only on the ExFat one.

That actually works - when the installer can't find the big image on the original partition you can point it to the other one and the installation will continue.

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