Create a UEFI boot compatible USB stick for Windows 10

I needed a Windows 10 start up disk, but I didn’t have a working Windows 10 machine. You can grab one from the Microsoft website.

Once downloaded insert the USB stick into the machine and open disks:

In the top right hand corner you will see a vertical ellipses:

It’s advised you format the disk first.

To make it compatible with UEFI, I am going to use some software called Ventoy, this is released as open source software and can be downloaded from their website.

I am doing this on Ubuntu, once downloaded you will see a .tar.gz file in your download folder:

We need to extract this. Double click on the file, find Ventoy with the respective version number:

Click on extract. This will be extracted into the downloaded folder in this instance:

OK, now we get onto the interesting bit.

Go into the folder, right click and open the directory in Terminal:

OK, the terminal is now open:

We can now run Ventoy. Run the command:

sudo ./VentoyWeb.sh

In your browser, go to the IP address provided, in this instance 127.0.0.1:24680

Click on options then partition type:

As I am trying to create a UEFI boot disk, select GPT.

Hit the install button. You will have a couple of warning prompts, just agree to them, this will format the insetered USB stick:

Click OK.

Check that the Ventoy disk is showing:

If you can’t see it, unplug the device and re-insert it.

When Ventoy is installed it will change the disk to two partitions, VTOYEFI and Ventoy.

The VTOYEFI, this is a small partition with some EFI stuff in, the other partition is Ventoy.

Go into the Ventoy partition and simply drag the ISO from your downloads into this partitions:

It can take some time for it to copy over, with me it took 20 minutes:

Don’t just unplug the USB stick, go through the correct procedure and eject the disk partitions, it can now be used to boot the Windows 10 installer.

It’s as simple as that, job done.