Create windows 10 bootable usb from mac os

It’s fairly easy to create bootable USB installation media for Windows 10 when using Microsoft’s Media creation tool. Unfortunately this tool is not available for macOS. This post explains you how to do this without using a Windows-based PC or VM and without using BootCamp assistant. This can come in handy when trying to install Windows on your mac or when there is simply only an Apple Mac available and you need to boot the Windows installer for various reasons.

YouTube Video

If you are interested, I also created a YouTube video from this blogpost. If you prefer classic text, you can just follow the rest of this article:

Introduction

Unfortunately, since some time, it became a bit more complicated to create this USB drive from macOS. The main reason for this is because macOS supports only FAT32 as filesystem that is compatible with Windows (and ExFat but that causes issues to boot from). FAT32 has a file size limit of 4GB while the installation ISO now contains one file that is larger.

To overcome this, we will need to use a tool, Wimlib, which is able to split this file in two parts. More about this later.

In case you’re looking for the instructions to create a bootable USB drive to install Windows 11 instead, have a look at the following article: https://jensd.be/1740/windows/create-a-bootable-windows-11-installation-usb-on-macos

Download the Windows 10 ISO

Let’s start by downloading the ISO from Microsoft. This can be done from: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/Windows10ISO. When you open this link on macOS, it should show you the ability to download the ISO rather than the Media Creation tool, which is shown when opening the same on a Windows-based PC.

Choose for Windows 10, then select the preferred language, go for the “64-bit Download” and wait for the download to complete to get the .iso file on your Mac:

Prepare the USB drive

While the ISO is downloading, we can prepare our USB drive. You will need one that is at least 8GB. Insert the drive in your Mac and start Disk Utility.

In Disk Utility, choose to show all devices:

Then, on the left side, select your USB drive from the list and click Erase on the top right menu. In the dialog, enter a name for the drive (WINUSB here), choose to format as “MS-DOS (FAT)” and “Master Boot Record” as scheme. Finally click “Erase” to complete the process.

Copy all smaller files to the USB drive

After the previous step, our USB drive is prepared. Once the ISO file is download as well, double click the ISO file to mount it. Then open it in Finder. As you can see, the sources folder contains one large file: install.wim which is over 4GB and will not fit on the FAT32-formatted USB drive:

We will take care of that later so for now, copy all remaining files to the USB drive using Finder.

I typically start by copying all separate files and folders, except for the sources folder:

Then I create the sources folder and copy all files from sources with the exception of install.wim:

Prepare to split install.wim

So far things were pretty straightforward and if it wouldn’t be for that large file it would be a piece of cake. Unfortunately we have to work around that by splitting the file in two parts, smaller than the limit of our file system on the USB drive.

To accomplish this, we can use Wimlib (https://wimlib.net/). This is a tool that is developed to work with, and modify, .wim files. The easiest way to get this installed on your Mac is by using Brew (https://brew.sh/).

So, as just mentioned, we start by installing Brew. As is instructed on the Brew website, copy and paste the mentioned line in a terminal and execute it.

user@users-iMac ~ % /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
==> Checking for sudo access (which may request your password).
Password:
==> This script will install:
/usr/local/bin/brew
/usr/local/share/doc/homebrew
...
==> Next steps:
Run brew help to get started
Further documentation: 
https://docs.brew.sh
user@users-iMac ~ %  

Once Brew is installed, we can use it to install Wimlib:

user@users-iMac ~ % brew install wimlib 
 ==> Downloading https://ghcr.io/v2/homebrew/core/openssl/1.1/manifests/1.1.1k
...
==> Installing wimlib
==> Pouring wimlib--1.13.4.big_sur.bottle.tar.gz
🍺  /usr/local/Cellar/wimlib/1.13.4: 65 files, 2.7MB
user@users-iMac ~ % 

Split install.wim and get it on the USB drive

Now that we have Wimlib installed, we can use it to split the large install.wim file and copy it to our USB drive. In the same or a new Terminal session, execute the following:

user@users-iMac ~ % wimlib-imagex split /Volumes/CCCOMA_X64FRE_EN-GB_DV9/sources/install.wim /Volumes/WINUSB/sources/install.swm 4000
Splitting WIM: 4654 MiB of 4654 MiB (100%) written, part 2 of 2
Finished splitting "/Volumes/CCCOMA_X64FRE_EN-GB_DV9/sources/install.wim"

In the command above, we told to execute the wimlib-imagex tool (part of Wimlib) and passed some arguments:

• “split” to indicate that we want to split this larger file
• “/Volumes/CCCOMA_X64FRE_EN-GB_DV9/sources/install.wim” which is the source file to split. Keep in mind that the name under /Volumes depends on the ISO name so you need to adjust this accordingly. Just do ls /Volumes from the terminal to see what is there.
• “/Volumes/WINUSB/sources/install.swm” the destination of where the split files should end. As with the ISO name, here WINUSB is the volume label I gave to my USB drive when erasing it with Disk Utility. Adjust this as well when you chose something different earlier.
• 4000 the max. size of the destination file, so the file will be split in a part of 4000MB and the rest.

After this command completes, you can see that now two files were created on the USB drive:

The Windows 10 installer knows how to deal with these and will just work fine.

That should be all you need to create a bootable USB drive for Windows 10 installation.

(Optionally) download Windows 10 drivers for your Mac

If you plan to use the USB drive, which you created with the above steps, on a regular PC then you can skip this step. If you, on the other hand, plan to use this for installation on a Mac, it is a good idea to go through these additional steps.

The goal of this is to fetch the necessary drivers for use on Mac. As I did from Windows in a previous article, I will use Brigadier for this. Brigadier, which is basically a script, works just from macOS directly as well.

From the author’s Github page: https://github.com/timsutton/brigadier, click the green Code button then choose to “Download ZIP”

Once the file is downloaded, open a fresh Terminal session and navigate to the “brigadier-master” in your Downloads folder, then simply execute it using ./brigadier:

user@user-iMac ~ % cd Downloads/brigadier-master
user@user-iMac brigadier-master % ./brigadier
Using Mac model: iMac13,1
...
Expanding flat package...
Extracting Payload...
Extracted to /Users/user/Downloads/brigadier-master/BootCamp-041-84821/WindowsSupport.dmg
user@user-iMac brigadier-master %

As you can see in the output, executing brigadier automatically detected the model identifier of the mac which we executed this on. If you want to download the required drivers for another model, you can simply pass it using the –model parameter. The files got downloaded as a subfolder of brigadier-master as WindowsSupport.dmg

All that is left to do is to navigate to the folder using Finder, then to open WindowsSupport.dmg to mount it and to copy those files to the USB drive:

After going through the installation, executing BootCamp/setup.exe will install most of the required drivers or at least enough to continue the rest of the driver installation using Windows update.

Boot from the USB drive

As the final step, now that the USB drive is prepared, with or without additional drivers for your Mac, you can boot from it.

On a regular PC, this is usually done by pressing a key at BIOS time to bring up a boot menu (F11 is often used for this) or, for some older BIOS, by changing the boot order from the BIOS setup.

On a Mac, you can choose to boot from USB by holding down the Alt key on boot and to select the USB drive from the boot loader:

Операционная система Windows более капризная и менее стабильная, чем macOS от Apple. Открытость ОС, отсутствие встроенной системы резервного копирования и большое количество вредоносного ПО часто приводят к необходимости перестанавливать Windows.

При наличии второго Windows-компьютера под рукой создать загрузочную флешку не составит никакого труда.

? Спасибо re:Store за полезную информацию. ?

Сейчас расскажем, как выйти из ситуации, когда есть только рабочий Mac.

В тему: как создать загрузочную флешку macOS в Windows

Еще несколько лет назад создать загрузочную флешку можно было при помощи стандартной утилиты Boot Camp, которая предназначена для быстрой установки Windows на Mac.

Приложение подготавливало загрузочную флешку, записывало на нее установщик Windows и заливало драйвера для корректной работы всех модулей Mac. Использовать такую флешку можно было не только на компьютерах Apple, с ее помощью можно было установить Windows на любой подходящий компьютер.

С недавнего времени разработчики macOS переработали утилиту и вместо создания загрузочной флешки она сразу же начинает установку системы на отдельный раздел Mac.

К счастью, есть и другой достаточно простой способ задать флешку для установки Windows.

Как создать загрузочную флешку Windows

1. Для начала потребуется образ с операционной системой. Скачать его можно прямо с официального сайта Microsoft.

Образ Windows 10 занимает чуть более 5 Гб дискового пространства, на скачивание обычно уходит от 15 до 30 минут.

2. Далее понадобится флешка объемом 8 ГБ и более, которая будет отформатирована в формате Fat32.

Можно воспользоваться приложением Дисковая утилита или сделать все в Терминале.

3. В Терминале выполняем следующую команду:

diskutil list

Видим перечень внутренних и внешних накопителей на Mac. Находим нужный по объему и запоминаем его номер. Далее вводим команду:

sudo diskutil eraseDisk FAT32 WININSTALL MBRFormat /dev/disk3

FAT32 — нужная нам файловая система;
WININSTALL — метка флешки после форматирования (можно указать любое имя);
disk3 — номер подключенного накопителя, который будем форматировать.

Вводим пароль администратора, ждем несколько секунд и получаем готовую чистую флешку.

4. Остается лишь скопировать содержимое образа с Windows 10 на флешку.

Для этого монтируем образ и вводим в Терминале такую команду:

cp -R расположение_образа/ расположение_флешки

Чтобы вручную не прописывать длинные пути, нужно лишь ввести начало команды “cp -R “, а затем перетянуть образ на окно Терминала из Finder. Путь к нему пропишется автоматически.

Теперь пишем “/ ” (без кавычек с пробелом) и перетаскиваем в Терминал флешку из Finder.

5. Копирование займет определенное время. Никакого статуса при этом отображаться не будет. Об окончании процесса можно судить по светящемуся диоду на флешке (во время копирования он будет мигать).

Можно просто подождать около 20 минут.

Теперь флешку можно использовать для загрузки на компьютерах и ноутбуках с поддержкой UEFI. К сожалению, для старых Windows-ПК такой способ не подойдет.

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March 21, 2019 updated by

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