Hi all, long time no post!
I've recently had a need for a legacy (BIOS) bootable Windows 10 USB installer. I wrote a quick utility to help me create it, should I need it going forward. I wanted to share with the crowd here in case someone else finds it useful. Note that there is NO support for UEFI, as the device I am attempting to boot is ~10 years old and is not Apple hardware. UEFI support is easy mode anyway!
You can find the project at my github: https://github.com/toru173/Windows-10-MBR-USB-Creation-Tool
I've recently had a need for a legacy (BIOS) bootable Windows 10 USB installer. I wrote a quick utility to help me create it, should I need it going forward. I wanted to share with the crowd here in case someone else finds it useful. Note that there is NO support for UEFI, as the device I am attempting to boot is ~10 years old and is not Apple hardware. UEFI support is easy mode anyway!
You can find the project at my github: https://github.com/toru173/Windows-10-MBR-USB-Creation-Tool
Code:
Windows 10 MBR USB Media Creation Tool
Usage: ./createinstallmedia /path/to/win10.iso /dev/diskX. Must be run as root
This is a tool created to solve a specific need - to create a Windows 10
installation USB for legacy BIOS systems using MBR, with minimal additional
tools, on macOS. A couple of interesting things to note:
- macOS has long included a tool to format NTFS-compatible partitions,
possibly since macOS Sierra as part of the Boot Camp Assistant program
- macOS has had the ability to mount NTFS volumes read/write since at least
Mac OS X Snow Leopard
- macOS has included fdisk for a long time. The man page is dated 2002!
The only external utility required is ms-sys, available at http://ms-sys.sourceforge.net
a compiled macOS binary is included here for ease of use.
createinstallemedia mimics Apple's 'createinstallmedia' binary, available at
https://support.apple.com/HT201372