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A bit of personal experience: I've needed to create a Windows 10 installer from a MacOS computer a few weeks ago. Without the MS helper program I've figured I s

A bit of personal experience: I've needed to create a Windows 10 installer from a MacOS computer a few weeks ago. Without the MS helper program I've figured I should perform the following steps: 1- download iso 2- format usb with fat32 3- copy the data Apparently you can't just dd the ISO file into the USB block device like every other Linux or BSD ISO. It need to be FAT32 to be able to boot through UEFI. The issue however is that the .wim file containing the OS installation source is bigger than 4GB. I think its sources.wim but I'm not sure. I had to install some command line utility from brew that did the job of "optimizing" the WIM file and managed to reduce it to a file bellow 4GB. What does optimizing means? Better compression? Cleaning up crap inside the image? If their ISO tool probably does this without user interaction then why include a file bigger than what the FS can handle in the first place? I don't know if this counts as some kind of dark pattern or MS being really antiquated in terms of bootable flash drivers.

cto_of_antifa 5y ago
This is what the use BalenaEtcher for.
freeone3000 5y ago
It's a case of it working fine on Windows, so, there's no need to bother supporting anything else.
vbezhenar 5y ago
What I'm doing is just using GPT partitioning, creating one NTFS partition and copy all files there. All my computers were able to boot in UEFI mode from this USB drive and successfully install Windows. With Linux it was a bit more cumbersome, but most Linux distros are hybrid ISOs anyway, so it's not as big issue. I know that UEFI BIOS is not obligated to support NTFS partitions, but my little practice they do.
- ulzeraj 5y ago
  Good to know that this is an option but from MacOS I don't have NTFS write capabilities. I think ExFat is available so I might try two partitions one being the EFI ESP and the second containing the rest of the install files.

cto_of_antifa 5y ago

This is what the use BalenaEtcher for.

freeone3000 5y ago

It's a case of it working fine on Windows, so, there's no need to bother supporting anything else.

vbezhenar 5y ago

What I'm doing is just using GPT partitioning, creating one NTFS partition and copy all files there. All my computers were able to boot in UEFI mode from this USB drive and successfully install Windows. With Linux it was a bit more cumbersome, but most Linux distros are hybrid ISOs anyway, so it's not as big issue. I know that UEFI BIOS is not obligated to support NTFS partitions, but my little practice they do.

ulzeraj 5y ago
Good to know that this is an option but from MacOS I don't have NTFS write capabilities. I think ExFat is available so I might try two partitions one being the EFI ESP and the second containing the rest of the install files.