When I opened the Windows 10 ISO, it mounted as a volume named EXAMPLE-VOLUME-WINDOWS10, so I used the following command to copy its contents to the USB drive: cp -rp /Volumes/EXAMPLE-VOLUME-WINDOWS10/ * /Volumes/WINDOWS10/

Eventually I found that using cp (copy) from the command-line worked without any problem. I received an error about the files being too large, even though the partition on the drive was definitely big enough, and no individual file appeared to be too large for the FAT32 file system. Oddly enough, copying the files through Finder didn’t work. I was supposed now to be able to mount the Windows 10 ISO by opening it through Finder and copy its contents to the USB drive. You can do this with the graphical interface too, opening Disk Utility app using Spotlight ( command+space ), selecting the USB device and formatting it with the details mentioned above. Next, the following command can be used to format the drive (replace disk# with the actual identifier for your USB drive) and mount it as a volume named WINDOWS10: diskutil eraseDisk MS-DOS 'WINDOWS10' MBR disk# First, run diskutil list and find the identifier of the USB drive (this will be something like disk2 or disk3 make sure you find the right one, since you could erase the wrong drive and lose data if you don’t use the correct identifier). Then you can simply mount the Windows 10 ISO in macOS and copy the files to the drive.įormatting the USB drive can be done from the command-line fairly easily. The device was not even recognized by the computer, and it turns out that in this way the device was not satisfying the required UEFI boot process.Īfter almost an hour of doing some research to solve this issue without recurring to a Windows PC, I found out that the USB drive must be formatted with FAT32 partition and the MBR partitioning scheme. The image does not appear to contain a partition table, and might not be recognized or bootable by your device.ĭespite the advice, I burnt the image and tried to install it anyway without having any positive result. The program I used was throwing the following output when I selected the Windows’ image: It looks like this is not a bootable image. I opted to download a custom image of Windows 10 and burn the ISO into an USB using Etcher (as one typically does when installing a Linux distribution) to create a bootable Windows 10 installation drive from my Macbook, but things were not as simple as they seem.

I stopped dealing with Windows seven years ago and currently in my home we use Arch Linux and MacOS, so it turned out to be a little bit challenging for me to get in touch again with it. Recently my cousins asked me to install Windows into a new computer that they have bought and came without any OS.

Making a Bootable Windows USB Drive on macOS without any tools

How to make bootable sierra usb