Can i use DD to burn a windows.iso?

Question

I've got a Windows 10 ISO that I burned on a USB stick using these instructions:

1. fdisk -l (my usb is /dev/sdb)
2. umount /dev/sdb
3. Use gparted to format into FAT32
4. dd if=/path/windows10.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=4M

But when I try to boot from the USB, it doesn't work.

I have checked the BIOS and it's by default to boot from USB (I can boot from my Debian and Ubuntu USB but not from the windows one).

Can't dd burn windows ISO?

Solution 1

This is what worked for me in order to write/boot Windows 10 PE on as usb drive.

From https://askubuntu.com/a/487970/48496

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Install GParted and GRUB on Ubuntu with:

sudo apt-get install gparted grub-pc-bin p7zip-full ntfs-3g

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1. Rewrite the partition table as msdos and format your USB drive as NTFS using GParted (and then "Manage flags" and add the boot flag).
2. In GParted, right click the USB partition and select Information. Copy the UUID somewhere as you will need it.
3. Copy all files from mounted Windows ISO or DVD to USB drive using your favorite file manager.
4. Go to USB drive and if the folder named boot has uppercase characters, make them all lowercase by renaming it.

5. Install GRUB on USB:

   sudo grub-install --target=i386-pc --boot-directory="/<USB_mount_folder>/boot" /dev/sdX
   

6. Create a GRUB config file in the USB drive folder boot/grub with the name grub.cfg.

   Write this into the file:

   echo "If you see this, you have successfully booted from USB :) <or whatever you want>"
   insmod ntfs
   insmod search_fs_uuid  
   search --no-floppy --fs-uuid <UUID_from_step_2> --set root 
   ntldr /bootmgr
   boot
   

7. Unmount the USB drive and restart your PC. Choose the USB as the first boot device in BIOS and start booting from it.

Solution 2

use universal usb installer. I know. I did what you did.. however, I used the windows version. It works.. here is the link http://www.pendrivelinux.com/universal-usb-installer-easy-as-1-2-3/

Comments

[vinchaud]

@Parto Already checked but i'll read it again i guess.

[Parto]

Cool. The first answer specifically...

[sudodus]

No, dd cannot burn a windows iso file. You need a tool, for example mkusb or mkusb-nox, or to do the extraction manually.

[holms]

I don't understand why you offering windows software, i don't have windows anywhere, and there's no way to install it without making usb bootable stick ..

[Kallaste]

Sheesh to dd? Sorry, but that is ridiculous. dd is one of the most direct and reliable ways to burn an iso, or any raw image format. Many gui programs are really just a dd front end. There is no reason to belittle someone for wanting to use and understand the actual lower level utilities instead of just gui nonsense.

[terdon]

@Kallaste while I agree about the CLI vs GUI, do note that dd is almost completely obsolete these days. Why use dd to write a disk image to another disk when you can simply use cat instead?

[Kallaste]

@terdon: dd is absolutely not obsolete. It is still used by sysadmins as well as forensic technicians for many tasks, and although other tools can duplicate some of its functionality (I have no idea why you would want to use cat over dd, but I am thinking of other tools), they cannot do everything by a long shot. dd is the only basic Unix tool in existence that can truncate or overwrite a file at any sector point that you specify. You can repair a corrupt partition table by writing zeroes to the first few bytes. You can modify data in place. Just yesterday I used dd to repair an MBR.

[Kallaste]

When you need to write data sector by sector, I cannot think of a single tool that gives you finer control than dd.

[terdon]

@Kallaste writing at any point of a file is indeed still useful. I did say almost obsolete :). But writing zeroes to the first few bytes can more easily be done with head -c512 /dev/zero > /dev/sda for example and writing an image to disk is much more easily done with a simple cat image.iso > /dev/sda2. dd is a great tool, but its syntax is really obscure, it is very easy to make a mistake and mistakes can be very costly. So unless you really need that level of control, there's little reason to use it.

[Arsinclair]

If you have this error error: will not proceed with blocklists. with grub-install, you are probably writing it to /dev/sdx1 instead of /dev/sdx. More on this here: unix.stackexchange.com/a/329954/278029