WinDiskWriter — creating a bootable USB with Windows on macOS

TechUnRestricted — Sat, 16 Sep 2023 16:41:16 +0000

WinDiskWriter

For macOS users, making a flash drive with Windows has been a challenging task.
However, there is a simple solution that enables them to easily create a flash drive with Windows.

Introducing the WinDiskWriter — an application for macOS that will allow you to write a bootable .iso file on your USB flash drive.

Supported Microsoft Windows Images 💿

Windows 11
Windows 10
Windows 8.1
Windows 8
Windows 7
Windows Vista

Features ⭐️

Writing a bootable .iso file on USB drive
Patching Windows 11 image in order to ignore the hardware requirements set by Microsoft
- TPM 2.0
- Secure Boot
- Minimum Storage Capacity
- Minimum RAM Capacity
- and others...
Installing an EFI-capable boot file for Windows 7 and Vista
Splitting large install.wim file in order to fit onto FAT32 filesystem
Advanced progress tracking
Wide compatibility starting from Mac OS X 10.6 and ending with the latest version of macOS at the time of writing — 14.0 Sonoma

What was the problem initially? 🤔

         Starting with Windows 8, Microsoft has simplified the process of preparing USB devices for booting in UEFI mode with the installer of their operating system.
         For a long time, everything was good and convenient — macOS users only had to format their USB flash drive in FAT32 and transfer data from the .iso image to it.

         However, starting with a certain version of Windows 10, one of the installation files has become larger than 4GB, which is simply incompatible with the FAT32 file system, which is used to boot in UEFI mode.

         A challenge that arose with Windows 11 was the hardware requirement imposed by Microsoft, which included a TPM 2.0 chip, enabled Secure Boot and some other things such as installed RAM.

And here is the solution! 😉

I have developed software that solves the problem of writing installation flash drives on macOS.

WinDiskWriter works with 64-bit Windows images, which are compatible with the EFI standard.

All you need is:

macOS 10.6+
USB drive
Windows.iso (or directory with extracted content)

From this point on, everything should be fairly clear, right? 🤔

Yeah, I think so. Anyways...

Download the latest release of WinDiskWriter
Run WinDiskWriter
Configure
1. Choose your Windows.iso
2. Select your target USB device
3. Switch the "Patch installer requirements" toggle in order to bypass Windows 11 hardware requirements
4. Click on "Start"
Hooray? Yes, if everything went well and the program notified you about it

So, what's next? 😳

That's it 👍.
        Safely remove the USB device and boot in UEFI mode on your PC.
        The booting and installation of Windows should be successful if there were no problems during the writing of the flash drive.
        In any case, if something has gone wrong, be sure to let me know about it in Issues.

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