Currently my OS is Ubuntu 13.10. I want to make a bootable USB with Windows 8 in it.
You can make your USB Drive bootable with Windows 8 in it without using any additional software.
All of you have to do is:
- Boot into your Ubuntu or any other Linux system;
- Format your USB drive (prefer to have 8GB or more in size) with NTFS filesystem;
- Copy everything from that extracted form of Windows ISO into the USB drive.
Once the copying is finished, issue following commands in your preferred terminal:
os-prober
, it should detect your USB Drive as Windows Recovery Environment with corresponding drive location like /dev/sdb1;
- If
os-prober
detects your USB drive then type grub-mkconfig -o grub.cfg_location
where grub.cfg_location is your grub configuration file location, typically is /boot/grub/grub.cfg
The last command will create an entry for Windows 8 with the name Windows Recovery Environment in your Grub menu. You can now restart your system, boot into Grub menu and select the corresponding option to boot into Windows 8 installation.
Note : You can also easily remove this new Grub entry by running the same command with USB Drive unplugged.
Sure; if it's an exact copy of the ISO then it's bootable just create an iso from the file the follow the guide of your choice to make a bootable disk – Ramhound – 2014-03-06T02:32:28.400
@Ramhound Does the USB became bootable if I simply copy the files to it ? – TomJ – 2014-03-06T02:35:03.023
1I've done this before with Windows 7 by creating a bootable ISO in k3b (it is not obvious how to do this) and using unetbootin (you need a slightly older version as you'll need to format the flash drive to NTFS) to load it onto the drive as normal. It was several months ago now so I can't quite recall, but I'll have to see if I can find some information tomorrow and answer here with some details if someone else hasn't. – Dylan – 2014-03-06T02:38:41.703
@Dylan Ok. I will wait... – TomJ – 2014-03-06T02:41:54.380
Just a quick note regarding my previous comment, it seems that the latest versions of unetbootin have hard disk support again (at least on Fedora - Ubuntu repos could be a bit older) so it might not be necessary to use an older version. – Dylan – 2014-03-07T23:29:21.943