Create bootable Windows 8.1 from a Mac

OK, I’ve tried this something like a zillion times (and also for Ubuntu). Here are the mistakes:

Do Not use Mac Unetbootin

Finally if you try to use unetbootin on the Mac, it has been broken for three years (?!!). The things you have to do manually are to mark the partition as active and then copy something into the Master Boot Record

Command line creation for Windows doesn’t work, but does for Ubuntu

The main lessons are that for Ubuntu at least Unetbootin doesn’t create a bootable USB (at least on Yosemite, it used to work on previous versions). You are instead left with using command line that looks like first converting the ISO to a DMG and then using dd to push this to the usb drive from stackoverflow.com. This however didn’t work for some reason this didn’t work with a Windows ISO but does with Ubuntu ISO. Not sure why
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Download the ISO you want to use
Format your USB key with Disk Utility so that it is in FAT (e.g. MBR) by doing an erase of it
Open Terminal (in /Applications/Utilities) 2.1 Navigate to the path where the .iso file is located 2.2 Use ls to list all the folders 2.3 cd [folder name] to dive in to folder or cd.. to go back the path
Convert .iso to .img using hdiutil:
Figure out what the usb drive is with `diskutil list` so for example suppose it is /dev/disk2
Unmount the drive so dd can write it with `diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk2`
Then use `dd if=*.img of=/dev/rdisk2 bs=1m` to copy it. Not we use `/dev/rdisk2` which means use the raw interface and that is faster

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### Boot Camp Assistant works with Windows with a small glitch…success!

The second approach is to use Boot Camp Assistant, but for some reason it doesn’t like the Windows 8.1 ISO that I have. Maybe it is corrupt? You basically run Boot Camp Assistant and point it to the ISO and it should work but it doesn’t.

<
p style=”color: #222222; font-family: ‘Helvetica Neue’, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 19px;”>This approach seems to work, but not that Boot Camp automatically adds Mac drivers for Windows so you get an error message if you try to use this for some other computer. It’s not the general solution