published: 30th of June 2020
If you have Parallels use that to create a Windows 10 VM and use Windows Media Creator to create the bootable USB.
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 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 !!!!
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.
When I purchased my new Mac I switched over from VMWare's Fusion to the Parallels 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.
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.