techunrestricted / windiskwriter Goto Github PK

🖥 Windows Bootable USB creator for macOS. 🛠 Patches Windows 11 to bypass TPM and Secure Boot requirements. 👾 UEFI & Legacy Support

License: GNU General Public License v3.0

C++ 0.17% C 85.54% Objective-C 14.29%

bootable-usb fat32 macos macos-app objective-c secureboot tpm wimlib windows windows11

windiskwriter's Introduction

WinDiskWriter

Windows USB Disk Creator for macOS

    💖 Hey there! If you like my work, please support me financially! 💖

You can use this app to create bootable universal USB Windows installers that supports both UEFI and Legacy BIOS modes.
With this USB drive, you can install and enjoy Windows on your PC, Intel Mac or certain Virtual Machines.

Features

Compatibility

💻 Supported Windows Images

🍏 Supported macOS Versions

Planned Changes

Additional Information

❤️ Support Me ❤️ (Donations)

Authors

Software Used

Features

📀 Create Bootable USB Windows Installers
_{WinDiskWriter knows how to make a bootable drive for each Windows Image type.}

🛠 Patch Windows 11 Installer
_{You can bypass TPM, Minimum RAM, Secure Boot and some other System Requirements set by Microsoft for Windows 11.

Just click Patch Installer Requirements before writing.}

👾 Legacy BIOS Support
_{You can create an all-in-one USB drive that supports both UEFI and Legacy boot modes.

It's required if you want to install Windows on computers with old firmwares that don't support EFI booting.}

🔐 Add EFI Support to Windows Vista and 7
_{Windows Vista and 7 don't support EFI booting out of the box.

Additional steps are required to get these versions to boot on EFI, such as extracting a EFI-capable bootloader from the installer. WinDiskWriter does it for you!}

🗂 Split Windows Installer Images
_{Newer Windows ISOs contain a large (>4GB) install.wim file.

Since FAT32 only supports file sizes up to 4GB, WinDiskWriter automatically splits it for you!}

Compatibility

💻 Supported Windows Images

Version	Architecture	Boot Mode	Verified?
Windows 11	x64	UEFI, Legacy	Yes
Windows 10	x64, x32
Windows 8.1
Windows 8
Windows 7
Windows Vista

🍏 Supported macOS Versions

Version	Architecture	Verified?
macOS Sonoma 14.0	x86_64, ARM64	Yes
macOS Ventura 13.0
macOS Monterey 12.0
macOS Big Sur 11.0
macOS Catalina 10.15	x86_64
macOS Mojave 10.14
macOS High Sierra 10.13
macOS Sierra 10.12
OS X El Capitan 10.11
OS X Yosemite 10.10
OS X Mavericks 10.9
Mac OS X Mountain Lion 10.8		Not Yet _{(but it should work!)}
Mac OS X Lion 10.7
Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6

Planned Changes

📁 Add support for selecting individual partitions
_{This will allow you to choose the destination device not only from the list of ‘whole’ disks, but also the individual partitions of your USB drive or any internal disk.}

🗜 Add support for splitting install.esd (compressed system image) files
_{Some Windows ISOs, (usually repacks) use .esd system images for better compression.

But sometimes, even a .esd file is too large to fit into FAT32 partitions.

Right now, WinDiskWriter can only split install.wim images. Splitting .esd requires wimlib to be updated.}

💻 Add support for 32-bit Macs
_{Right now, you can only use WinDiskWriter on x86_64 / ARM64 Mac computers.

Since this software has the minimum Mac OS X requirements of Snow Leopard 10.6, it's possible to compile a 32-bit build.

But I can’t do it right now, since this kind of build operation isn’t supported on Apple Silicon.}

📝 Implement a feature that allows adding a custom ei.cfg
_{This feature will allow users to select the Windows edition of their choice, regardless of the ACPI SLIC configuration.}

🌐 Implement a feature that allows to skip the online account requirement from Windows 11 22H2+
_{This feature will allow users to skip the requirement for signing in to their Microsoft Account on the install stage.

Since this feature isn't implemented, use "OOBE/BYPASSNRO" by pressing Shift+F10 on the Microsoft Account login stage.}

🎨 Resolve UI drawing issues on Mac OS X Mavericks 10.9 and lower
_{There are some UI drawing issues on some older Mac OS X versions due to different behaviour of some system views.

It’s not critical at all, and it doesn’t affect functionality.}

Additional Information

This software is written in Objective-C, a programming language that allows it to run on many versions of macOS, from Snow Leopard 10.6 to Sonoma 14.0. Objective-C is a powerful and efficient language that combines object-oriented and dynamic features with the C language.

WinDiskWriter uses wimlib, a library for manipulating Windows Image (WIM) files, to perform operations such as splitting, patching, and extracting. I would like to thank the developers of wimlib for their amazing work and contribution to the open source community.

WinDiskWriter optionally can use a grub4dos bootloader to enable Legacy BIOS Support. I would like to thank the developers of grub4dos for their great work.

❤️ Support Me ❤️ (Donations)

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Authors

@TechUnRestricted

Software Used

wimlib _{^{(GNU LESSER GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 3)}}
grub4dos _{^{(GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 2)

(grub4dos is a downloadable option in WinDiskWriter)}}

windiskwriter's People

Contributors

Stargazers

Watchers

Forkers

jpcaparas ferohers sorafloatykitty fossabot billyweikel umsuny9 williamqf-ai kbhkn 8direz3 dukou007 kennyhn88 mawkxcom elooonmusk beynelmilel gsantos00 roziki-dev malikkorucu

windiskwriter's Issues

This Software fix the problem of SSD not showing up

I was having a strange problem that the installation of windows 10 and 11 was not recognizing any partition of my ssd. I was trying to make dual boot in my steam deck.

The first thing a can mention is that a was using balena etcher on a Mac OS to create this windows bootable flash drive. Balena etcher was showing a pop-up saying something about a missing bootable partition table or something like that.

This happened with the image o windows 10 and 11.

After a flashed the windows 11 image using WinDiskWriter with the patch o TPM the problem was solved.
I am sharing this piece of information for my steam deck colleagues out there so they know that using a Mac to create the windows bootable USB with balena etcher may need to use WinDiskWriter to properly flash their dual boot.

this may even help those that just need a clean install of windows but the SSD don't show up.

Feature Suggestion: Support for Android-x86 Distros

Hi, I would like to suggest adding support for creating bootable USB Installations for different Android-x86 distros Specially BlissOS distros which are actually the reason why I'm suggesting this because I'm having compatibility issues with those specific distros as they require SSE4.2 CPU instruction support which I'm also hoping you could bypass like you did with windows 11.

noob: how do I actually run the program?

hi,

apologies but downloading the zip file I can't for the life of me figure out how to run the software.

apologies on the noob question.

thanks
Nock

No drives show up unless I select "Scan All Whole Disks" option

My USB drives don't show up unless I select the "Scan All Whole Disks" option under Debug. I've tried with multiple USBs, they all have this issue.

I'm on a hackintosh (closest Mac equivalent is the iMac19,1) running Sonoma 14.2.1.

Can contribute in translation to Arabic?

I'm ready if you agreed.

Windows 7, stops/stalls on boot in old imac (late 2009)

(I have created bootcamp to install windows - but need to start with windows 7 and test some drivers/programs etc)

I have tested the tool with Windows 7 - but the mac (imac 27 late 2009) stalls/freezes after choosing the efi boot usb on startup.
If the image is burned to a DVD it can boot up.
.. on a windows 10 image to USB it works ...

Is this a known issue - can anything be done in this matter ?
It could be VERY nice if you could fix it for windows 7 - my impression is that then this tool would be extra good ;-)

/ p

Feature Request: Option to Remove the Online Account Requirement from Windows 11 22H2+

Thank you very much for this project!

This could replace Rufus in Parallels for me in terms of preparing/creating Windows install USBs if it had the option to bypass the mandatory requirement for a Microsoft account on Windows 11 22H2+.

See where this option was added to Rufus: pbatard/rufus@a0d6692

Thanks again so much!

Need a windows 10 Recovery USB

I am a professional Windows developer. I’ve been working on Windows on Mac since 2010 - I have had a frequently recurring problem - probably 20 times over the past 15 years - Somehow, I get a corrupt file in the Windows boot sector - On my old Mac Pro 2010 -running Windows 7, I could easily repair the Windows operating system with a recovery disk. However, since updating to a Mac Pro 2019 - I have been unable repair the disk and have had t reinstall Windows 4 times already. I am really at my wits end.

I’m hoping you can provide a bootable USB that will solve my problem.I tried donating $100 as a sign of good faith but all your Crypto accounts require downloading the app and creating an account.

My email appears at the bottom of this page: https://moirasmith.com/ I’ll arrange payment via PayPal or others.

There are many recovery disk offerings on eBay - but none that will work with Windows/Mac - I’m sure there would be a market for one.

No Option On Start Up

I cannot for the life of me get this working -- maybe I need super noob instructions, since the regular noob ones aren't doing it for me.

I have the USB formatted with WinDIskWriter and everything worked fine -- said image writing was successful.

When I go to boot my MacBook - there just isn't an option to boot anything but the base OS. I'm running a Macbook Pro, M3, Sonoma 14.1

I went and checked to make sure my USB is discoverable as external, and it is. Went into Start-Up Security and changed everything to low just in case that worked -- it did not.

How do I boot this thing?? lol

Cant verify the image i just downloaded from the offical site [Windows 10]

I got the message right after i clicked the start button

The ISO what i am using is : Win10_22H2_Chinese_Traditional_x64v1

No longer splitting .wim files with latest Win11 ISO

Hello,
Recently downloaded a new Win11 iso from Microsoft and I get an error every time it tries to split the .wim for a FAT32 USB
I tried splitting it manually and got this error:

[ERROR] Splitting of WIM containing solid resources is not supported.
Export it in non-solid format first.
ERROR: Exiting with error code 68:
The requested operation is unsupported.

This is with the ISO downloaded directly from Microsoft

I was able to create an install USB by skipping the .wim, going in to terminal and doing something like

wimexport /Volumes/22631.2861.231204-0538/sources/install.wim all tmp-install.wim --compress=LZX:1

to export the .wim to non solid and then running the normal command to split that tmp-install.wim like

wimlib-imagex split tmp-install.wim /Volumes/WDW_Z7H7HKW/sources/install.swm 3800

Is there a way that this can be auto detected in the code? (catching the error and running the code path above, or detecting non solid .wim in the first place)

Thanks

It's not an issue, it's a big THANK YOU!

Here is the thing. I installed Windows 11 Pro on my new PC but I replaced it with Linux Mint yesterday. Today I was trying install Windows again (don't ask me why) but it didn't work. I always stucked on 'can't find the drivers for my SSD drive'. The problem was I used terminal and Etcher to create the installation USB and they seems not capable to do the job properly on my Mac Mini M1. Then I find your app, now the installation has already finished when I'm still typing. You're the best! Thank you for making this great app.

Feature Request: Option to add ei.cfg to enable edition selection

This is a feature that I wish that other tools like Rufus had just because it would help me avoid the extra step of adding an ei.cfg to a prepared Windows install USB each time.

I often have to install Windows Pro on hardware that came with Windows Home serials, causing the installer to default to installing Windows Home without prompting for edition selection. Adding an ei.cfg file is a simple way to enable the edition selection and override that default. As far as I am aware, this works as far back as Windows 7.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/windows-setup-edition-configuration-and-product-id-files--eicfg-and-pidtxt?view=windows-11

https://superuser.com/questions/1020961/prevent-windows-10-installer-from-using-the-preinstalled-serial-key-without-disa/1608112

Per the above, the following in the ei.cfg file should be sufficient to enable the edition selection:

[Channel] 
Retail

Thank you!