My daughter recently acquired a Thinkpad with Win10 on it, but there were many errors and no install disc. The larger problem was that there was no CD/DVD-ROM drive and I do not own an external USB DVD-ROM. She wanted a particular game to play, but I was not able to get it installed via wine/playonlinux after installing Debian to the laptop. I have Windows 7, but creating an install disc using dd is not possible without a lot of tinkering and also may not boot from certain devices. I post this here for developers stuck in a similar situation trying to work in both Linux and Windows.
I use a very customized Debian stable, with some unstable elements where required, that I built from CLI server install. Unfortunately the only thing that worked for me was to use a deb file from an unofficial Ubuntu repo that I had to download manually as adding this repo to sources.list could cause later more problematic issues. The deb file I found, the only thing that worked, is called woeusb. Here are the basic steps without needing to compile anything:
- Download the Ubuntu woeusb deb file.
- Install with
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dpkg -i woeusb-SOMESTRING.deb
- If the install fails it won't correct dependencies as the distribution is wrong, but it will tell you what you need. Check for it in the repo with and install with
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apt-cache search DEPENDENCY
. Do this until all dependencies are installed. If you can't find what you need in Debian or whatever OS you are using, you can check the Ubuntu repo website manually for it and install in the same manner, but I only had to install 1 library.Code: Select all
apt-get install DEPENDENCY
- After all dependencies are installed again,
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dpkg -i woeusb-SOMESTRING.deb
- to see listed devices.
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mount
to unmount both of them first. woeusb will mount when/if required.Code: Select all
umount /dev/DEVICE
- Using woeusb is simple, but you must specify by device or file using the "-d" option. once installed for detailed info.
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man woeusb
- Command requires a sudo prefix or in my case, login to root with .
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su
- woeusb -d /dev/ROMDRIVE /dev/USBDRIVE is the format to convert the entire USB device. e.g.:
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woeusb -d /dev/sr0 /dev/sdi
- A message appears when complete. Now you should be able to install Windows from the USB.
This was a pain to figure out. I hope it saves someone some time. I still had to get network drivers and more and add them to the USB afterwards which seemed to be writable only if logged in as root and changing permissions did nothing since it is an NTFS filesystem.
If you encounter problems it could be due to wrong format type, etc. I already had the USB formatted with NTFS before I used woeusb, so IDK if it reformats it, itself or not. Files over 4GB will require NTFS so do this only if you run into problems:
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mkfs.ntfs -f /dev/USBDRIVE