We’ll also need to enable the msftdata flag on the partition and then format it with an exFAT filesystem: sudo parted /dev/sdb mkpart winsetup ntfs 0% 99% It’s a quick hack that saves calculating partition sizes and also helps ensure that parted correctly block aligns the partitions. For the sake of simplicity I suggest using 0% and 99% as the boundaries as the exFAT driver filesystem image is only 512k. We’ll set the partition type as NTFS that is correct for exFAT. The first step is to create a new GPT partition table: sudo parted /dev/sdb mklabel gptĬreate an exFAT partition for the Windows ISO contents. Yours may vary depending on how many disks you have connected to the system so you will need to modify the remaining commands accordingly. In this case the disk shows up as sdb, so the device we’ll use for this exercise is /dev/sdb. sd 7:0:0:0: Attached SCSI removable disk sd 7:0:0:0: Write cache: disabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA scsi 7:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0 scsi 7:0:0:0: Direct-Access SanDisk Ultra 1.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6 usb-storage 4-1:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected usb 4-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3 usb 4-1: New USB device found, idVendor=0781, idProduct=5581, bcdDevice= 1.00 Plug the USB stick in and run dmesg to see what identifier it gets: usb 4-1: new SuperSpeed Gen 1 USB device number 15 using xhci_hcd the Rufus NTFS/exFAT UEFI driver image.the appropriate ISO image from Microsoft, and.WARNING: This will erase any existing data on the USB stick! Secure Boot must be disabled for this to work. This should work for any Windows version released over the last decade or so. Here’s the actual process to create a bootable Windows installer on a USB stick from a Windows installer ISO image for a UEFI system. I imagine this will also be perfectly doable on a Mac as well, with a few modified commands. This took a few attempts to get right but turns out to be relatively simple. So I set about to find a way to make a bootable Windows USB stick when you’ve only got immediate access to a Linux box. The ISO mounting capability via the server iDRAC console actually worked, but was painfully slow (hours).Tools that were known to work such as Rufus and the Microsoft USB imager only run in Windows, which I didn’t have handy.It’s too large to fit into Dell vFlash which has a image size limit of 4GB (presumably as it uses FAT32 internally).Update: wimlib can do this and means you can probably do this on a legacy FAT filesystem after all! There is a command in Windows ( dism) to split a WIM file but hadn’t come across any Linux tools to date.The ISO image contains a file ( install.wim) that is greater than 4GB, so won’t fit on a FAT32 filesystem as created by tools such as Unetbootin.It’s too large for a regular DVD-R disc, and I didn’t have any dual-layer discs on hand.Actually getting the server to boot and install from this ISO image was surprisingly difficult: Microsoft make the ISO images available for download on their website, however the Windows Server 2016 ISO clocks in at over 6GB. I recently had a case to install Windows Server 2016 on a Dell PowerEdge R630 server.
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