USB stick trouble

Support and Help
1

Hi Everyone,

If you use a Linux program to place a Windows 11 installation ISO on it, it will not work. When you boot it up, it will say it is missing a media driver.
Ubuntu’s startup disk creator does not recognize the iso file. And fedora media writer flatpak recognizes the iso as an iso but produces a non-workable Windows setup stick as per above.

If you have eliminated all Windows machines like I have, you have a journey to go through.

  1. On your Ubuntu machine, use apt to install virt-manager.
  2. Copy or download the Windows 11 ISO onto Ubuntu
  3. Use virt-manager to install Windows 11 as a virtual machine
  4. Use the virtual machine windows to download Rufus the USB stick writer
  5. Copy or download the Windows 11 ISO onto the virtual machine windows
  6. Use Rufus to write the Windows 11 ISO to the USB stick

Now you will be able to boot your Windows installation USB and install normally.

3

There is no need to create a Windows VM just to make a bootable Windows 10/11 installer (although a Windows 11 VM may prove useful for other tasks)
Try this instead https://www.ventoy.net/en/doc_linux_gui.html

4

From some notes: The Windows ISO should boot if simply copied to a USB with a FAT32 partition, but there is one file larger than 4GB that cannot be written to FAT32. The wimtools package has a program, wimsplit, which will split the large file into several smaller ones which do fit and are recognized at boot. (I used “3000” for the wimsplit size).