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:
Image of Ubuntu settings.
In the top right hand corner you will see a vertical ellipses:
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:
Ventoy download .tar.gz
We need to extract this. Double click on the file, find Ventoy with the respective version number:
Extract Ventoy onto your machine.
Click on extract. This will be extracted into the downloaded folder in this instance:
Extracted Ventoy image
OK, now we get onto the interesting bit.
Go into the folder, right click and open the directory in Terminal:
Ventoy, open directory in terminal
OK, the terminal is now open:
Ventoy directory in terminal.
We can now run Ventoy. Run the command:
sudo ./VentoyWeb.sh
Ventoy server is running
In your browser, go to the IP address provided, in this instance 127.0.0.1:24680
Ventoy in your browswer
Click on options then partition type:
Ventoy Usage
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:
Ventoy has been installed on the device
Click OK.
Check that the Ventoy disk is showing:
Check the Ventoy disk can be seen
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.
Ventoy partitions.
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:
Drag the Win 10 image into the Ventoy partition
It can take some time for it to copy over, with me it took 20 minutes:
The copying process
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.
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:
Image of Ubuntu settings.
In the top right hand corner you will see a vertical ellipses:
Vertical Ellipses
It’s advised you format the disk first, then you can restore from disk image.
Restore disk image using Ubuntu
You will get:
Restore image using Ubuntu, selection.
Click on the None:
Select the image to restore.
Click open, then start restoring:
Start restoring:
Confirm you want to restore:
Confirm you want to restore
It will start to restore:
Restore in progress
Eventually Windows 10 will be on the stick.
Win 10 is now on the stick.
In theory, we should be able to use this now as a bootable USB stick. But with newer machines it may need to have the EFI thing. I will discuss how that’s done on another post.
I know it’s been a while since I posted something, 2020 was a bit hectic!
A few years ago my old MacBook failed, turned out to be an issue with the hard drive so replaced it, I had to re-heat sync the CPU as well. When it initially started working again I had already purchased a new laptop, a MacBook Air, so thought I would stick a Linux OS on the old one. Initially, I did Fedora, but over the years I got fed up of that with issues upgrading. So this year I decided to stick Ubuntu onto it. This is how I did it:
The first thing I needed to do was to download a copy of the operating system, I did that on the Fedora operating system. I then used a USB stick that I had not doing anything and restored the stick using the image I had downloaded.
Next was to get any files off Fedora that I wanted to keep. I copied these files onto a external hard drive, no need to do a full back up, there weren’t that many.
A shut Fedora down for one final time. I inserted the USB stick into the MacBook. I booted up the machine holding down the Alt/Command key, I let go and got this:
Boot options to install Ubuntu
I selected the first EFI Boot. This will take you to a screen asking what you want to boot into. I couldn’t get a photo of this, it was quick. When you see the screen I chose Ubuntu and pressed the letter “e”. This took me to:
Ubuntu edit screen.
Where you quiet splash, take your curser down and add nomodeset
Ubuntu edit screen with nomodeset
This reads:
linux /casper/vmlinuz file=/cdrom/pressed/ubuntu.seed maybe-ubiquity quiet splash nomodeset ---
Press F10 to proceed. Eventually you will get a screen like this:
Ubuntu error check
Once Ubuntu has done its thing you will be asked if you want a demo or install:
Ubuntu selection
This time am going to install Ubuntu. Now you will be taken through the install process.
The first thing to do is select your keyboard. My MacBook is a English UK Macintosh keyboard:
Select a keyboard
Click on continue.
In theory you should be able connect to your network on the next screen. But I had issues with that so I selected the WiFi network at the top right hand corner, select the network and stick your password in.
Click on continue, you will now be asked what type of install:
What to install?
I want a normal installation, download updates during install, I also checked the install third-party software. Click continue:
Where to install?
You may see something different, in this case I am going to erase the disk and instal Ubuntu, click continue, you will get a prompt:
Prompt on what it will do with erasing the disk.
Click continue. Select where you want the timezone, for me, I’ll stick that as Melbourne Australia.
Select timezone.
Click on continue once done.
Nearly done, enter your name, what you want to call the machine, your username and password, continue. Ubuntu will install.
Install Ubuntu
When the install is complete, you will be asked to restart your machine:
Install complete.
Click restart now. The machine will spin down and you will be asked to remove the install media:
Remove install media.
So now is the moment of truth, remove the media and hit enter.
When booting, I got the error:
Error on boot.
After digging around online, I read that this is a common issue when installing Linux on older machines. But the good news, there is a work around.
Stick the install media back into your machine and repeat the process to get into the install screen:
Install media reinserted.
This time select “Try Ubuntu”.
Open the documents file structure and navigate to “Your_Hard_Drive/boot/efi
Ubuntu EFI directory
As you can see, nothing is there. We need get a shim64.efi file in it.
Navigate to /boot/grub/x86_64-efi, find the grub.efi
Grub EFI directory.
What we need to do is move this as root, right click in this directory and open it in terminal.
Run the command:
sudo cp grub.efi ../../efi/shim64.efi
EFI copy terminal command
For those eagle eyed viewers, will notice the screenshot doesn’t have the sudo, you need the sudo to run it as a root user.
Press enter. Now check that it has been copied, go back into the efi directory to make sure it’s there:
EFI directory after.
Job done. Now reboot the machine. I got the same error when rebooting, but after a few seconds, maybe 10 seconds or so and it will start to boot up.
