[SOLVED] Using Manjaro to create a bootable Windows 10 for dual boot?

Novatian · 11-13-2021, 03:43 AM

I am using Manjaro to create a bootable Windows 10 USB. I watched an how to video. I have the Windows 10 download, and formatted the USB, but on start up to upload, it was not bootable. The option to make a bootable USB in Disk from Utilities, was I think light gray and not bold. I don't know how to make the USB bootable and in operation.

Disk allows formatting... But when I opted for FAT 32 the 16 gb sandisk 3.0 would not take the files from Windows 10 the loader said it only had 4 g space so I used NFTS. Then It took them via Disk Image Mounter and a copy and paste into the USB.

I then want to run Windows 10 and dual boot with Mint 20.2. On an old legacy BIOS desktop, with an SSD.

mredc · 11-13-2021, 06:51 AM

You can do that from the command line using dd. If you do a google search you can find more info. You don't need to format the disk beforehand dd will just duplicate the contents of the ISO onto the USB drive. Unmount the USB drive. Don't try to write to a partition. Write to /dev/sbX, /dev/scX, /dev/sdX or what ever name your drive is presented as.

Novatian · 11-13-2021, 07:49 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mredc

You can do that from the command line using dd. If you do a google search you can find more info. You don't need to format the disk beforehand dd will just duplicate the contents of the ISO onto the USB drive. Unmount the USB drive. Don't try to write to a partition. Write to /dev/sbX, /dev/scX, /dev/sdX or what ever name your drive is presented as.

What is dd again? And the ISO is the one processed by Disk Image Mounter?

Is there a way to do it using program, USB Image Writer?

yancek · 11-13-2021, 11:50 AM

Quote:

I watched an how to video

Is this a secret video or is there some other reason you did not post the link?

What is Disk from Utilities, some programs specific to Manjaro? The windows files on the iso are usually larger than 4GB which means you need to use ntfs rather than vfat. Try the detailed instructions at the link below which should work, at least they did for me. Do you have Grub Legacy available? You will need to manually create the grub.conf or menu.lst

http://onetransistor.blogspot.ch/201...om-ubuntu.html

colorpurple21859 · 11-13-2021, 06:33 PM

I've had some success with woeusb, https://github.com/WoeUSB/WoeUSB-ng

Novatian · 11-14-2021, 12:22 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by yancek

Is this a secret video or is there some other reason you did not post the link?

What is Disk from Utilities, some programs specific to Manjaro? The windows files on the iso are usually larger than 4GB which means you need to use ntfs rather than vfat. Try the detailed instructions at the link below which should work, at least they did for me. Do you have Grub Legacy available? You will need to manually create the grub.conf or menu.lst

http://onetransistor.blogspot.ch/201...om-ubuntu.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-wKghiPAdI&t=83s

mredc · 11-14-2021, 01:36 PM

What is dd? Open a terminal session and type:

Code:

man dd

Here is one video about dd.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfqzzVhHsrc

colorpurple21859 · 11-14-2021, 07:56 PM

General how to put windows onto usb manually to boot both uefi and legacy:

create a new msdos partition table
make 2 partitions, the first partition formatted ntfs large enough to hold the iso file, the second partition 800mb formatted fat32
mount the ntfs partition and extract contents of windows10 iso to ntfs partition
mount fat32 partition and copy all files except sources directory to the fat32 partition from the ntfs partition.
create a sources directory on the fat32 and copy sources/boot.wim from the ntfs partition to sources/boot.wim on the fat32 partition
run

Code:

grub-install --target-i386-pc --boot-directory=<mount point of fat32 partition> /dev/???

where ??? is the usb device
create a /grub/grub.cfg on the fat32 partition with the following:

Code:

menuentry windows --class windows {
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root <uuid of usb ntfs partition>
ntldr /bootmgr
boot
}

You should now have a windows10 usb that will boot in both efi and legacy mode.

Novatian · 11-15-2021, 02:50 AM

Is it possible to use "USB Image Writer" the GUI program to make such a USB stick? I tried, and looking in using Disk, I see the image is there, not bootable. I cannot see how to make it bootable since the edit partition option is light gray and not pressable.

Before writing the stick was bootable, but the computer does not boot from the stick at startup.

yancek · 11-15-2021, 04:16 AM

I used the link you posted above (post # 4) to create a windows 10 bootable iso without any problem whatsover. It's a very simple step by step process and it works. Why do you continue to bring up USB Image Writer whatever that is?

Just read over your initial post. You want windows 10 and Mint on the same USB and you want to boot both Mint and windows 10 with Grub Legacy, am I write on this? If so, the link I asked you to post and which you did won't work as it only explains how to create a windows 10 bootable usb. When you loop mount the windows iso file, there should be a file with a .wim extension. If that file is 4GB or more, you will need windows on an ntfs filesystem because vfat can't handle files of 4GB or more.

Once you get the windows usb bootable, you will need to put the extracted Mint iso on the drive, on the same or more likely another partition. If you want to boot both with Grub Legacy, you will need to get Grub Legacy and many current Linux systems do not come with Grub Legacy. Do you know how to install Grub Legacy. You will also need to manually create the Grub Legacy boot menu file, eiter menu.lst or grub.conf.

I think I have a file somewhere explaining this process so will see if I can find it later. Good luck.

Novatian · 11-15-2021, 08:39 AM

USB Image Writer comes native to Manjaro and Ubuntu as part of the system the GUI USB maker.

I tried this method:
https://itsfoss.com/bootable-windows-usb-linux/

It resulted in either a flashing underline at boot up, or constant beeping and strange non English or numerical characters appearing and running down the screen. No luck.

I may have to try Ventoy.

colorpurple21859 · 11-15-2021, 10:08 PM

Is the system 32 or 64 bit and what is name of windows iso your using?

Novatian · 11-16-2021, 04:50 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by colorpurple21859

Is the system 32 or 64 bit and what is name of windows iso your using?

64 bit, windows 10 21h1 raw cd image.

computersavvy · 11-16-2021, 10:37 PM

What is the exact name of the windows iso file?
I just went to the MS download site and the current (latest release as of Nov 2021) iso image for the english language is Win10_21H2_English_X64.iso
Note that I did the download from my daily driver (fedora) and since MS saw that it was not a win machine it gave me a bootable iso that can be copied directly to the usb device.

With manjaro the easiest way I know to write that file to a USB drive for booting and installing windows would be to use dd.

Code:

sudo dd if=Win10_21H2_English_X64.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=32M

would work extremely well.
- You would need to be in the directory where the file was downloaded, or use the full path to that file location.
- /dev/sdX would be the usb device you are writing to. It must not have any existing partitions mounted while writing to it with dd.

yancek · 11-17-2021, 05:40 AM

Quote:

I tried this method:

In post 9 above you have a link below the above quoted comment which apparently did not work. Never tried it myself. I did make a typo in my earlier post (10) in which I referred to an incorrect link. I posted a link in post 4 which is what I actually used to create the windows bootable usb. I am sure there are a number of different methods but this worked for me so I stopped looking for others. This method only creates the bootable windows USB (as do other methods suggested) so that is only half the problem as you also want to include Mint 20 on it but using Grub Legacy to do it will likely create a bigger problem.

I found the file which I used to manually boot windows 10 from Grub Legacy and added some info to include Mint on the drive. Hope my rather cryptic notes are of some help.

Quote:

Tested booting windows 10 extracted iso from Grub Legacy on ntfs partition 2. Grub would not seem to recognize or be able to mount ntfs so I created a 100MB vfat partition at the beginning of the drive and created a boot directory there and a grub sub-directory in the boot directory then copied
stage1, stage2 and stage2_eltorito files to the grub directory. Created the menu.lst below and placed it in the /boot/grub directory:

timeout 10
color black/cyan yellow/cyan
default 0

(The (hd0,1) below is Grub Legacy counting drives AND partitions from zero)
title Windows 10
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
makeactive
chainloader +1
boot

Created a second partitiion ntfs formatted using the rest of the flash drive and in GParted, selected the ntfs partition, Manage Flags and set the boot option. Then copied all the files from the windows extracted iso from the location on the hard drive to the second partition on the USB labelled windows.

Above I indicate using 'the rest of the flash drive' to copy the extracted windows iso files to. That won't work if you also want Mint on it. You can either create a third partition to put the extracted Mint iso files on or leave enough room on the ntfs partition on which to place the Mint files. It will be an iso9660 filesystem so it doesn't matter to Mint that the base filesystem is ntfs. Might be simpler to create a third partition though.

You will need to create a proper menu.lst file entry to point to mint

The Sandisk (I used a Sandisk USB) showed as sdb so I installed grub legacy:
root (hd1,0)
setup (hd1)

It boots from a restart on the machine as well as from virtualbox..