Microsoft provide a fantastic program for creating Windows boot disks that "just works" (Media Creation Tool), and have done so for years.

It doesn't support Linux images, though, for reasons that should be obvious.

Media Creation Tool requires internet access, so you can't just flash a Windows .iso that you have independently downloaded from microsoft.com. Of course, you can always prepare the correct disklabel yourself, use a BOOTSECT.EXE incantation to make the USB bootable, then copy all the files, etc, but this really should be easier than that.

Are you sure about that? I distinctly remember using .isos with Media Creation Tool.

I just tried it and the tool started downloading Windows without giving me an option to select an .iso. It can download .iso's for burning them to DVD's but I don't think it can take dangling .iso's and make installation USBs out of them.

Ahh, fair enough. Thanks for clarifying.

Definitely weird, I installed windows about a month ago and it asked in the tool if I wished to install using an ISO.

Also a Linux user, but back in the Windows days you could use Diskpart to do so:

    select disk ##
    clean
    create partition primary
    active
    format fs=ntfs quick
    assign

Then just extract the disk image to the USB Drive and voila. I just noticed it's even documented on Dell's support page[0]

0: https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000136959/create-a-...

That’s not a feature of Windows, but simply how UEFI works.

https://www.happyassassin.net/posts/2014/01/25/uefi-boot-how...

Key quote because my linked article is quite extensive:

> What the firmware will actually do when trying to boot in this way is reasonably simple. The firmware will look through each EFI system partition on the disk in the order they exist on the disk. Within the ESP, it will look for a file with a specific name and location. On an x86-64 PC, it will look for the file \EFI\BOOT\BOOTx64.EFI. What it actually looks for is \EFI\BOOT\BOOT{machine type short-name}.EFI - 'x64' is the "machine type short-name" for x86-64 PCs. The other possibilities are BOOTIA32.EFI (x86-32), BOOTIA64.EFI (Itanium), BOOTARM.EFI (AArch32 - that is, 32-bit ARM) and BOOTAA64.EFI (AArch64 - that is, 64-bit ARM). It will then execute the first qualifying file it finds (obviously, the file needs to be in the executable format defined in the UEFI specification).

I have to say that M$ has screwed up diskpart in some versions of Windows. Sometimes it simply cannot clean the disk correctly after being formatted using some other tools such as Rufus.

Rufus is a light and effective tool when Windows user want to create USB bootable. In the past, I faced some issues about disk partition. The Windows Media Creation Tool usually created MBR partition but my disk was on GPT partition. Rufus did well on creating USB bootable with detail log. No need to type complicated command. No need to copy and edit files. Just select, select and press Start.

Because the small percent of users that do need it serve many other Windows users. Seems sorta obvious that SOMEone needs the functionality.

That's why we're here talking about Rufus. I'm not sure what you were getting at but thank you for demonstrating my point.