Hang on, how can we use Windows to install Windows if we don’t have windows? Installing Windows on a Mac using BootcampĮven though it might seem counter-intuitive to install Windows on a Mac just to create a Windows 10 install on a USB stick, this was the simplest solution I could find.

And the solution involves using Windows itself. There is a much easier way! How to create a USB stick to install Windows from WindowsĪfter all this struggle I realized that there must be an easier way to create a USB stick to install Windows from a Mac. To make FAT32 work you need to split the file which is bigger than 5GB into chunks under the file size limit. However, my BIOS will not boot from a USB flash drive formatted with ExFAT. Some of the solutions to this problem propose using ExFAT instead, as it accepts file sizes above 4GB. The latest Windows 10 install has a file with 5GB, so if you try to copy the install files to a USB stick, it will fail because one file is over 4GB size.

The main reason why it is so hard to create a Windows USB stick from a Mac has to do with file size limits on the FAT32 file system(4 GB).

Why is it so hard to create a USB stick to install Windows 10

I have even seen articles suggesting to use rsync! Come on, if I want to install windows, I definitely do not want to resort to Rsync.

Some convoluted methods that require me to use diskutil either from the command line or from the UI, also no luck.

Using software utilities like UNetbootin, highly discouraged by Apple with some scary warnings, from doing so, also didn’t work for me.

I was able to create the USB stick but it wouldn’t boot on my new PC. Not only you need to have an old version of Macos X for this to work, but even if you do have one, at least in my case, it didn’t work.

I tried to create a USB stick to install Windows using Bootcamp.

I tried every different method described on the world wide web and all failed. The only drawback is that it requires some additional disk space in your Mac.īut before we get to the actual solution, let me just give you a quick overview of the different methods I tried before getting to this solution. You have tried every different method imaginable and nothing seems to work.Īfter a lot of trial and error, I have found a straightforward method that works every time. You are here because you want to create a USB stick to install Windows 10 but you only have a Mac at home.

Create a windows 10 bootable usb on mac