I am trying to create UEFI bootable USB sticks of Windows 8. What I do is the following:
diskpart
select disk 1
clean
convert gpt
create partition primary
format quick fs=ntfs
I then just dump the contents of the ISO into the USB. It does not boot but when I format to fat32 it works. Is this normal, or is it just my laptop that's not able to locate NTFS UEFI partitions?
FAT32 is really old and will essentially limit OS image sizes to 4GB (the WIM can't be bigger than that in a fat32 system).
I tried doing "create partition efi" to create a EFI system partition but I was unable to access it. Could I theoretically create an EFI system partition in linux, dump the contents of /efi/ into it, then create a primary NTFS partition and dump the rest of the stuff onto that partition?
This isn't a question pertaining to an issue since I solved it (formatting to fat32). I just want to know what's going on.
EDIT: Also as a bonus question. All the blogs and articles relating to "Create Windows 8 Bootable USB" do not mention "convert gpt" and just say to dump the contents of the ISO onto the disk. Some say to run bootsect.exe, others don't (doesn't make sense since UEFI doesn't use boot sectors). I don't see how this would work since UEFI needs a GPT disk to boot from. Is my laptop just very strict while others are lax on the standard?