Cant boot from flash drive with windows

Question

I'm trying to install Windows 7 on my computer. I loaded a legacy ISO with dd copy to an empty NTFS flash drive, added the "boot" flag and tried to load from the drive. I got this BIOS error:

Error loading operation system

I tried do this without dd, just formatting the flash drive with GParted, setting the "boot" flag and copying files from the unpacked ISO to the drive, but this also doesn't work.

After that I download ms-sys, added a MBR to the flash drive with the command sudo ms-sys -7 /dev/sdd, tried to boot from the drive and got this error:

This is not a bootable device. Please insert bootable floppy and press any key to try again

Any thoughts on what's wrong?

My motherboard is a Gigabyte M68MT-D3

Answer 1

FAT32 ISO Extract: Though untested by me, it seems that formatting the USB key as FAT32 and extracting the ISO onto the FAT32 partition is good enough for Windows 10 at least: Making a Windows 10 install USB. This is probably the same for Windows 7, but no guarantees - see potential alternative below. EFI apparently needs no special boot sectors just a FAT32 partition and the \efi\boot\boot[arch].efi loader (see above link).

This matches Microsoft's own documentation on the subject: Install Windows from a USB Flash Drive. Quote: "...select the FAT32 file system to be able to boot either BIOS-based or UEFI-based PCs".

The Windows USB/DVD Download Tool: For Windows 7, I would probably go for the The Windows USB/DVD Download Tool to be sure. It will create a bootable USB or DVD for you. ISO Download.

---

Some Links:

• How to create ISO for Windows
  • Deleted content, but maybe useful still?
  • More on license recovery and retrieval for example.