Creating a Win7 Boot Drive under Linux
Probably you had this problem at some point. You need a Win7 boot stick, but there's no computer with a inferior OS in sight. So here's how you do it under Linux.
What you'll need
- ~4GB USB Flashdrive
- Window 7 iso of your choice
- ms-sys (AUR: ms-sys; Source: ms-sys on sourceforge)
First reformat the stick as one big NTFS partition and don't forget to set the boot flag. Be aware this following command will delete /dev/sdX without questioning again! Check that sdX is your actual usb stick!
sudo parted --script /dev/sdX mklabel msdos mkpart primary ntfs 1 100% set 1 boot on
then lets create a temporary directory to work in, create a mountpoint for the stick, the ISO and last but not least mount the iso and the Stick.
cd $(mktemp -d) mkdir stick mkdir iso sudo mount -o loop ~/Downloads/myWin7Image.iso ./iso sudo mount /dev/sdX1 ./stick
Now we can copy all Windows files to the Stick.
rsync -vPr iso/ stick/
After this we can simply unmount both paths.
sudo umount ./iso sudo umount ./stick
Currently nothing would happen so let's use ms-sys from the same named package to write a windows bootloader onto the stick.
sudo ms-sys -7 /dev/sdX
That should be It! Now go and boot your inferior system and do what you gotta do.
