Hi,
I know.."ugh...a Windows question"..but bear with me here.
I recently convinced my wife to switch to a Mac, so now she has a brand new MacBook Air and I have her old Sony Vaio laptop. I attempted for some time to turn it into a hackintosh but failed and, after toying with a couple different distos of Linux, have decided to re-install Windows onto it.
Where I'm running into a problem is that I only have an .iso of Windows 7 (it's legit, I got it through my University) and have no ability to burn it to a dvd (the burner in the Vaio is kaput).
So, what I am trying to do (and have been trying to do for several days) is to "burn" the Windows 7 iso to a 16gig thumb drive that I have.
I've tried several different tutorials online but I'm guessing there is a flaw somewhere.
So far what I've done is:
Plug the USB drive into the MacBook Air and then, in the terminal, unmounted it, and used dd to copy the iso contents to the drive using both of these commands:
sudo dd if=windows.iso of=/dev/disk2 bs=8192
and
sudo dd if=windows.iso of=/dev/disk2 bs=1m
And, after waiting quite a long time, I eject the drive, plug it into the pc, and boot it but the pc always just skips past the drive and boots directly into Ubuntu.
Obviously, the computer is capable of booting from USB (from this usb drive, specifically) because it's the very same one that I used to install Ubuntu and other linux distros from over the past few weeks.
The only thing that I can see being a problem is that I can't get the drive to format to NTFS...could that be it?
And before anyone says that Windows can't be installed via USB, please search the internet because it very well can (and I've done it many times, but those times I prepared the USB drive from a Windows computer.)
So, does anyone have any tips or pointers for me?
Thanks
Zac
I know.."ugh...a Windows question"..but bear with me here.
I recently convinced my wife to switch to a Mac, so now she has a brand new MacBook Air and I have her old Sony Vaio laptop. I attempted for some time to turn it into a hackintosh but failed and, after toying with a couple different distos of Linux, have decided to re-install Windows onto it.
Where I'm running into a problem is that I only have an .iso of Windows 7 (it's legit, I got it through my University) and have no ability to burn it to a dvd (the burner in the Vaio is kaput).
So, what I am trying to do (and have been trying to do for several days) is to "burn" the Windows 7 iso to a 16gig thumb drive that I have.
I've tried several different tutorials online but I'm guessing there is a flaw somewhere.
So far what I've done is:
Plug the USB drive into the MacBook Air and then, in the terminal, unmounted it, and used dd to copy the iso contents to the drive using both of these commands:
sudo dd if=windows.iso of=/dev/disk2 bs=8192
and
sudo dd if=windows.iso of=/dev/disk2 bs=1m
And, after waiting quite a long time, I eject the drive, plug it into the pc, and boot it but the pc always just skips past the drive and boots directly into Ubuntu.
Obviously, the computer is capable of booting from USB (from this usb drive, specifically) because it's the very same one that I used to install Ubuntu and other linux distros from over the past few weeks.
The only thing that I can see being a problem is that I can't get the drive to format to NTFS...could that be it?
And before anyone says that Windows can't be installed via USB, please search the internet because it very well can (and I've done it many times, but those times I prepared the USB drive from a Windows computer.)
So, does anyone have any tips or pointers for me?
Thanks
Zac
