Creating a bootable Windows 10/11 USB flash drive in CLI Linux/Mac

winboot.md

How to create a bootable Windows 10/11 USB flash drive in Linux/Mac.

1. Download Windows image (iso)

• Windows 10
• Windows 11

2. Plug your USB flash drive

Linux detected /dev/sde as the USB stick, in your case it will most likely take a different name.

3. Format your USB flash drive

Work as root account and make sure to replace /dev/sde with your USB flash drive! Use lsblk and dmesg | tail -50 commands to locate your USB flash drive.

wipefs -a /dev/sde

parted /dev/sde
(parted) mklabel gpt                                                      
(parted) mkpart BOOT fat32 0% 1GiB
(parted) mkpart INSTALL ntfs 1GiB 10GiB
(parted) quit

Check the drive layout now:

In my case I've used 100% instead of 10GiB when created the "INSTALL" ntfs partition - mkpart INSTALL ntfs 1GiB 100%. But you can use anything that should be larger than 6 GiB to fit the data from Windows ISO image. parted /dev/sde unit B print

Model: SanDisk Extreme (scsi)
Disk /dev/sde: 62742792192B
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags:

Number Start End Size File system Name Flags
1 1048576B 1073741823B 1072693248B BOOT msftdata
2 1073741824B 62742593535B 61668851712B INSTALL msftdata

4. Mount Windows ISO somewhere

I mounted it to /mnt/iso directory:

mkdir /mnt/iso
mount /home/<your user>/Downloads/Win11_English_x64v1.iso /mnt/iso/

5. Format 1st partition of your USB flash drive as FAT32

mkfs.vfat -n BOOT /dev/sde1
mkdir /mnt/vfat
mount /dev/sde1 /mnt/vfat/

6. Copy everything from Windows ISO image except for the sources directory there

rsync -r --progress --exclude sources --delete-before /mnt/iso/ /mnt/vfat/

7. Copy only boot.wim file from the sources directory, while keeping the same path layout

mkdir /mnt/vfat/sources
cp /mnt/iso/sources/boot.wim /mnt/vfat/sources/

8. Format 2nd partition of your USB flash drive as NTFS

mkfs.ntfs --quick -L INSTALL /dev/sde2 
mkdir /mnt/ntfs
mount /dev/sde2 /mnt/ntfs

9. Copy everything from Windows ISO image there

rsync -r --progress --delete-before /mnt/iso/ /mnt/ntfs/

10. Unmount the USB flash drive and Windows ISO image

umount /mnt/ntfs
umount /mnt/vfat
umount /mnt/iso
sync

11. Power off your USB flash drive

udisksctl power-off -b /dev/sde

Done Now you are ready to boot off of your USB flash drive to install Windows 11.