Create a Windows 10 bootable USB on MacOS
Published: 2020-06-30
TLDR
If you have Parallels use that to create a Windows 10 VM and use Windows Media Creator to create the bootable USB.
Intro
I recently built a PC that I intend to use for gaming and recording content on and I want to use Windows 10 as the operating system. I only had a Macbook and needed to create a bootable USB drive so I could install Windows. It's 2020 and you would think this would be easy. THINK AGAIN SAM!
For the last few years https://www.balena.io/etcher/ has been my goto bootable USB making tool. It works on Windows/Mac/Linux and is great for creating bootable USB drives of many different variants. UNLESS! You want to create a bootable Windows USB. It does not create Bootable Windows USB's ... LE-SIGH !!!!
The Struggle Is Real
After half a day of stuffing around with different disk formatting options and methods of getting the Windows files onto the USB I finally managed to create a bootable USB. Victory? Not quite!
I won't bother going over the steps because once Windows booted to the installer I was getting an error along the lines of "A media driver is missing". There is a lot of conflicting information around what is the cause of the error. In the end I gave up on ever being able to create a bootable Windows 10 USB from MacOS.
Parallels to the Rescue
When I purchased my new Mac I switched over from VMWare's Fusion to the https://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/ virtual machine software. It has a nifty feature to create a Windows 10 VM with 1 click. I used this to build a Windows 10 VM and create the bootable USB from within the VM with Windows Media Creator. Boring I know.
Outro
Creating a bootable Windows USB without a Windows PC/VM is a shit show. If you have parallels use that to create a Windows 10 VM and use Windows Media Creator to create the bootable USB.