Argthtjtr

I tried everything and nothing works I have 2 brand new USB keys 3 more packaged. I have 3 valid Windows 8.1 ISO files and yet no approach works.

I tried Unetbootin takes forever to copy 4.3GB to the USB stick and does not work. I tried Ask Fedora approach using:

1) Formatting USB drive to FAT32 and using:

su -c 'dd if=/home/kristjan/Prejemi/win.iso of=/dev/sdc bs=400M'

This takes 30min to complete and nothing files are copied to the drive but it does not boot. When I mount it after it's now showing as FAT but as UDF.

2) Formatting USB Drive to NTFS and using:

su -c 'dd if=/home/kristjan/Prejemi/win.iso of=/dev/sdc bs=8M'

This takes 30min same as above.

3) I tried using GParted approach shown here:
SuperUser: Windows USB from Fedora
This one wants to boot but does not. I reboot, press ENTER>F12 To get to boot selection menu I select the USB drive and it does not skip back to boot selection screen like above solutions do but it just stays on a black screen with a blinking _ cursor.

4) I tried setting the boot flag from GParted and using DD but does not work either.

Why is this so hard on Linux systems. I mean on Windows/Machintosh I can create a bootable USB stick in 10min. On Linux it takes 30min to copy the ISO contents and then nothing works : (

Just now, I successfully created a bootable USB from a Windows 8.1 ISO containing a UDF filesystem. This will properly boot a UEFI machine into UEFI mode for subsequent install. It will not boot a BIOS machine or a UEFI machine in BIOS compatibility mode.

1. 
   

   Mount the ISO:

   
   
   

   sudo mount -t udf -o loop,ro,unhide /path/to/file.iso /mnt
   
   

   
   



2. Insert the USB drive.



3. 
   

   Run fdisk and specify the device name of the USB drive; for example:

   
   
   

   sudo fdisk /dev/sdc
   
   

   
   



4. Delete any existing partition table and create a new one.




5. Create a new partition of at least 4.5 GB. Mark it bootable and set its type to 7 (HPFS/NTFS/ExFAT).




6. Write changes and exit fdisk.



7. 
   

   Create a FAT-32 file system in the new partition; for example:

   
   
   

   sudo mkfs.vfat -F 32 /dev/sdc1
   
   

   
   


8. 
   

   Mount this partition to an existing subdirectory; for example:

   
   
   

   sudo mount /dev/sdc1 /media/usbstick
   
   

   
   


9. 
   

   Copy all of the files from the mounted ISO into this directory:

   
   
   

   sudo cp -rv /mnt/* /media/usbstick
   
   

   
   


10. 
    

    Sync the file systems just to be sure:

    
    
    

    sudo sync
    
    

    
    


11. 
    

    Unmount both items previously mounted:

    
    
    

    sudo umount /media/usbstick
    
    sudo umount /mnt
    
    

    
    

Creating a bootable Windows install USB isn't too tricky if you install ms-sys:

# First, format /dev/sdX with a single partition (w/bootable flag set)

# Then, run the following

dev="/dev/sdX"

sudo mount -o loop win.iso /mntA

sudo mkfs.ntfs -f -L win ${dev}1

sudo ms-sys -7 ${dev}

sudo mount ${dev}1 /mntB

rsync -aP /mntA /mntB

sudo sync ${dev}

sudo umount /mntA /mntB

If you're trying to install Windows 8 to the USB drive, it gets slightly more complicated. See the guide here: https://thesquareplanet.com/blog/installing-windows-8-1-to-go-on-usb-drive-from-linux/

dd overwrites whole filesystem, so the formatting to FAT32 or NTFS before running dd makes no sense.

if you are 100% sure that your Windows-8.1 ISO image /home/kristjan/Prejemi/win.iso is able to boot from USB you can try to install liveusb-creator package using

sudo yum install liveusb-creator

and use it to transfer ISO data to USB stick.

Edit: Another alternative is unetbootin package which does basically the same thing of producing bootable USB stick from ISO.