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Comment by asutekku | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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 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.

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