Difficulty getting "Universal USB Installer" to work in WINE

Question

I have a 16 GB USB flash drive inserted into a machine running Linux Mint.

I want to use the Windows program Universal USB Installer via Wine (the end goal here is to create a XenServer bootable USB drive as described here, but that's not relevant to this question).

Currently this is the status of my USB flash drive with fdisk:

# fdisk -l /dev/sdb

Disk /dev/sdb: 16.0 GB, 16008609792 bytes
64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 15267 cylinders, total 31266816 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000e2ab6

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1            2048    31266815    15632384    b  W95 FAT32

So everything appears to be fine, but when I load up Universal USB Installer with WINE, it doesn't detect my USB drive:

I edited the image to remove the username, but as you can see, the USB drive is not shown.

So I ran wincfg to see if I could manually assign the drive...

^{(The image has been edited to remove the user's name.)}

It looks like Wine is successfully detecting my USB drive (the /media/$USER/87F1-4491), why doesn't Universal USB Installer see my USB device?

Also: I know that a bootable USB can simply be made using dd; however, for some reason which is currently beyond my understanding, this doesn't seem to actually work in practice with the XenServer ISO. This seems to be a known issue, as the XenServer blog specifically recommends using Universal USB Installer. I tried using dd with the XenServer ISO, and it doesn't boot. (I have used dd many times with other bootable ISO files successfully, but for some mysterious reason it doesn't work for XenServer.)

Solution

Wine supports USB flash drives. To mount a USB flash drive so that Wine can use it, follow these steps:

1. Run winecfg
2. Select the Drives tab.
3. Click Add...
4. Choose a letter for the drive.
5. Click the Browse... button next to where it says Path:

6. Use the mount command to find wherever your operating system has mounted the USB flash drive. Insert your USB device and run the mount command. Eject your USB device and run the mount command again. Compare the first and the second mount runs. Detect one additional line in the second run. The additional line should be something like:

   /dev/sdd on /media/your-username/USB2DISK type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,uid=1000,gid=1000,shortname=mixed,dmask=0077,utf8=1,showexec,flush,uhelper=udisks2)  
   

   In this example the mount point of the USB drive is:

   /media/your-username/USB2DISK  
   

7. Click OK and then click OK again. Now the USB flash drive has been mounted so that Wine can use it.

8. Run Universal USB Installer.

Comments

[Ismael Miguel]

Try to set manually the path to the device. First, mount it, then you use the /mount/<dev> or /dev/<dev> path to access the filesystem. Then you can use it.