Windows 7

First of this described two different ways of getting windows 7 onto a bootable usb stick, because one of them worked once and not the second time. But this can just as well have been because they were different .iso images. Anyway more data is more power, so i describe once but note that the first one was the last to work !!.

winusb

Best choice !, because it worked and because it's less work !

I ended up using winusb, which you can download here :

visit

I just took the latest (vivid), dpkg will complain about missing libraries, but that's just for the gui (winusbgui). just use the commandline version.

Most information i got from here : visit

But in short : this will format and install the iso in one go :

sudo winusb --format [visit](iso path) [visit](device)

older way

OK, after unsuccessfully trying all methods mentioned here, I finally got it working. Basically, the missing step was to write a proper boot sector to the USB stick, which can be done from Linux with ms-sys or lilo -M. This works with the Windows 7 retail version.

Here is the complete rundown again:

Install ms-sys - if it is not in your repositories, get it here. Or alternatively, make sure lilo is installed (but do not run the liloconfig step on your local box if e.g. Grub is installed there!)

Check what device your USB media is assigned - here we will assume it is /dev/sdb. Delete all partitions, create a new one taking up all the space, set type to NTFS (7), and remember to set it bootable:

# cfdisk /dev/sdb   or   fdisk /dev/sdb (partition type 7, and bootable flag)

Create an NTFS filesystem:

# mkfs.ntfs -f /dev/sdb1

Write Windows 7 MBR on the USB stick (also works for windows 8), multiple options here:

# ms-sys -7 /dev/sdb

or (e.g. on newer Ubuntu installs) sudo lilo -M  /dev/sdb mbr (info) or (if syslinux is installed) sudo dd if=/usr/lib/syslinux/bios/mbr.bin of=/dev/sdb

Mount ISO and USB media:

# mount -o loop win7.iso /mnt/iso
# mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/usb

Copy over all files:

# cp -r /mnt/iso/* /mnt/usb/   ...or use the standard GUI file-browser of your system

Call sync to make sure all files are written.

...and you're done.

After all that, you probably want to back up your USB media for further installations and get rid of the ISO file... Just use dd:

# dd if=/dev/sdb of=/win7.img

and reverse if/of next time you want to put the Windows 7 installer onto USB.

As always, double check the device names very carefully when working with dd.

troubleshooting

If after all this you get an error about drivers needing to be loaded. I fixed this by setting up a working raid-1 array, it stopped complaining after that.

and/or ....

I had it again, this time, i recreated the array. But that did not help any. So Microsoft told me i might have burned my dvd on a too high speed.

Ridiculous for an usb stick of course. But on a hunch i moved the stick from a usb3 (blue)port to a normal usb port (without reboot !) and voilà .. it worked.