How can I make a bootable Windows installation USB on Mac OS X? After upgrading to macOS Mojave, you may find that Boot Camp Assistant is no longer supported and thus creating a bootable USB turns out to be a little bit challenging. In this tutorial we’ll show you how to create Windows 10 bootable USB from ISO on Mac, by using the Terminal or third-party software like UNetbottin.
Method 1: Create Windows 10 Bootable USB on Mac Using UNetbottin
Multi-Install - Performs a 'multi' installation of FMCB. A multi-installation can boot on all consoles of any region, and not only on the console it was installed with. Uninstall FMCB - Removes a normal installation of FMCB from a memory card. Uninstall MI - Uninstalls a multi-installation, turning it back into a normal FMCB installation.
UNetbootin is a free, open source utility that allows you to create bootable USB drives on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. If you’ve downloaded Windows 10 ISO image, here is how you can create a bootable Windows installer USB on Mac using UNetbootin.
Plug a USB drive into your Mac and open Disk Utility. Select your USB drive from the left panel and click on Info button. Note down the device name since we will need that later.
Next, download and launch the UNetbottin utility. Select the “Diskimage” radio button, click “…” to select a bootable ISO image.
After locating your Windows 10 ISO file, click on Open.
Choose Type as USB Drive and select the device name of your USB drive (you probably would’ve noted it down earlier, so refer to that). Click OK to start installing to the USB drive.
This process takes several minutes or longer, depending on the size of your selected ISO image.
Method 2: Create Windows 10 Bootable USB on Mac Using Terminal
Of course, if you prefer not to use third-party software, you can still use the excellent Terminal app, which is a little bit more involved, but no additional software needs to be installed. Follow these steps:
After connecting a USB drive to your Mac, open a Terminal window and type diskutil list to display all the disks attached to your machine. You have to figure out the disk identifier of the USB drive you need to format. In my example, my USB drive is mounted as “disk2” and it’s about 32GB.
Next, run the following command to format your USB drive and name it “WIN10“, where # is a placeholder for the disk identifier of your USB drive. diskutil eraseDisk MS-DOS 'WIN10' GPT disk#
Now, mount your Windows 10 ISO image with the command below, assuming it’s saved the Downloads folder. In my case, it is mounted as a volume named “ESD-ISO“. hdiutil mount ~/Downloads/your_windows_10_image.iso
Finally, run the following command to copy all the files from the mounted ISO to your USB drive. cp -rp /Volumes/ESD-ISO/* /Volumes/WIN10/
This command will take a while, and once it finishes, you can disconnect the mounted ISO with this command: hdiutil unmount /Volumes/ESD-ISO
Now you should be able to boot from the USB to install Windows 10 on your Mac or Windows machine.
Conclusion
These should be the easiest ways to create a Windows 10 bootable USB from ISO on Mac, without using Boot Camp Assistant. No matter which method you prefer, be sure that you backup any important data on your USB drive, as the procedure of creating bootable USB will delete everything on it.
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We previously showed you how to create a Windows 10 USB installation media when performing a clean install of Windows 10, but there might be an instance where the only machine you have available is a Mac. We'll show you to create a bootable USB flash drive with the Windows 10 installer from a Mac. It's easier than you think, thanks to the built-in Boot Camp Assistant from Apple.
Download Windows 10 Disc Image
First, you need to download the Windows 10 ISO file. Go to the download page and select the proper edition of Windows 10 in the dropdown menu. If you don't know what K, KN, or Single Language edition stands for, just select Windows 10 in the list.
Create USB installer with Boot Camp Assistant
After downloading the ISO file, you'll need to use Boot Camp Assistant to move it to a bootable USB drive.
Insert a USB flash drive to your Mac. Make sure it's at least 8GB, which is usually marked on the USB stick. You can also check by right-clicking the USB drive on your desktop and clicking Get Info. Check if the number next to Capacity is at least 8GB. All the files in the drive will be deleted, so make sure there are no important documents inside.
Open Boot Camp Assistant. The easiest way to launch it is through Spotlight Search, which you can bring up by pressing Command and Spacebar. Press Enter to launch the app.
Check the box for 'Create a Windows 7 or later version install disk' and deselect 'Install Windows 7 or later version.'
Click Continue to proceed.
Boot Camp Assistant will automatically locate the ISO file from your downloads folder, but make sure it is the right file. Click the 'Choose…' button and locate the ISO file. Make sure the destination disk is the USB thumb drive you've inserted.
Click Continue. It can take about 20 minutes to format and set up the USB installer on the Mac.
When Boot Camp Assistant is done, the USB drive will be renamed to WININSTALL. Click Quit to close the app and then Eject the USB drive.
That's it! You now have a bootable USB drive with the Windows 10 installer. You can use it to configure new Windows 10 PCs from scratch. We told you it was easy!
Have you tried creating a Windows 10 installer USB drive from a Mac before? Did you encounter any issues? Let us know your experience in the comments!
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