[mdlug] Convert Windows 10 USB Stick to iso

[Gregory Czerniak]

Easiest solution to the specific problem:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10ISO .

In the general case, if the thumbdrive emulates a USB DVD drive, you could
use cdrdao (http://linuxreviews.org/man/cdrdao/) to "rip" the virtual DVD.
If it shows up as Mass Storage, you could probably use some variant of the
mkisofs command presented in
http://www.g-loaded.eu/2007/04/25/how-to-create-a-windows-bootable-cd-with-mkisofs/
to do it specifically for the Windows case.  If it's not for a Windows ISO,
then it depends on whether you can find bootloader code that would start
things up properly once everything's converted to a ISO9660 or UDF
filesystem (assuming the filesystem is not already ISO9660 or UDF...).

Another possibility is to use "VBoxManage convertfromraw" (
https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch08.html#idp46730497476896) to convert
the dd'd thumbdrive image to a .vdi file, add it as a secondary virtual
hard drive, and set the virtual machine to boot from secondary on first
boot.

On Thu, Feb 4, 2016 at 11:31 PM, Brian Brodsky <brianbrodsky at ameritech.net>
wrote:

> I am feeling like a total newb. I bought Windows 10 that I want to run
> in VirtualBox as a guest on a Linux host. When you buy Windows 10 you
> get a bootable USB stick. VirtualBox does not have an option to boot
> from USB. I did see hacks, but I figured made more sense to create an
> iso and boot from that. I was able to do this using k3b gui program (I'm
> a kde user), but my first attempt using cli dd failed. The command I
> used (at root prompt) was dd if=/dev/sdc of=./windows10.iso. USB was not
> mounted and lsblk showed this was device I wanted. It did create a 15G
> iso file but VirtualBox said it was not bootable. I did create a
> bootable iso using k3b which is only 6.8G. Size difference is
> understandable since dd is an image copy and k3b is a file copy. Can
> somebody tell me how I could have created a bootable iso from the cli?
>
> Thank you,
>
> Brian
>
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