How To Create Instulltion Media For Windows 10 On Mac

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To troubleshoot an issue with Windows 10 (especially boot-related issues), it can be handy to boot to Windows 10 that is not installed on a Boot Camp partition. It is relatively straightforward to create a bootable USB Flash drive to boot to the Windows 10 installer, and then open up a DOS prompt for troubleshooting.

Here are the steps to create a macOS bootable USB media (Catalina) with GPT partition support on Windows 10 or 7/8.1 to rescue your Mac. Here are the steps to create a macOS bootable USB media (Catalina) with GPT partition support on Windows 10 or 7/8.1 to rescue your Mac. How to make a macOS bootable USB installation media. Use these steps. If you watch the video from post #5 to create a Macrium Rescue disk. It would be the same procedure to create the Windows Installation disk. Download Windows Installation ISO: Windows 10 and put on desktop for easy access. Create a partition on an internal/external drive around 5GB, format as FAT32.

What is needed

  1. USB Flash drive (8 GB or larger recommended)
  2. Windows 10 Installer ISO for Windows 10

Preparation

All the preparation is done in macOS on the Mac that is having an issue booting Windows. It is important to use this Mac since it will be used to identify the correct Windows drivers.

USB Flash Drive

The USB Flash drive must be formatted as exFAT.

  1. Insert an 8GB or larger flash drive into a USB port on the Mac
  2. In Disk Utility, format the Flash drive as exFAT. Quit Disk Utility after this operation completes.

Boot Camp Driver

Open Boot Camp Assistant in the Utilities folder, and download the current Windows Support Software from the Action menu. Save the Windows Support Software to your desktop or other location, but do not save directly to the USB Flash Drive.

Windows Install Media

Download the current install media from the Microsoft website. Windows is not going to be installed, but the install media will give access to the command line tools in Windows. Select the version of Windows that is closes to the version of Windows installed on the Mac (Windows 8, Windows 10). It does not matter what edition of Windows is used since Windows is not going to be installed.

Create Recovery USB Flash Drive

To create the USB Flash drive, follow these steps:

  1. Mount the Windows ISO that was downloaded from Microsoft. To mount the ISO, double click on the ISO in the Finder.
  2. Drag all the files and folders from the mounted ISO to the USB Flash Drive.
  3. Drag the contents of the Windows Support Software to the USB Flash Drive.
  4. If there is not an AutoUnattend.xml at the top level of the drive (as shown below), download AutoUnattend.xml, unzip it, and add it to the drive. AutoUnattend.xml provides the location of the $WinPEDriver$ folder to load the drivers during boot.
  5. The 2018 MacBook Air (and potentially Macs after that) have cannot load the IntelMEI driver and give a “Windows Setup could not install one or more boot-critical drivers. To install Windows, make sure that the drivers are valid, and restart the installation”. On the USB Flash drive, open the $WinPEDriver$ and remove the IntelMEI folder.

Once the Flash drive has been created, it should look like this:

The $WinPEDriver$ folder is important because the $WinPEDriver$ folder contains the drivers for Windows to boot successfully from the USB Flash drive and the hardware on that Mac.

Boot from the USB Flash drive

To inject the drivers, the Mac must be booted from the USB Flash drive.

  1. Insert the USB Flash drive into an available USB port on the Mac
  2. Reboot while holding the option key.
  3. Select EFI volume in the startup selector.

If Windows does not boot from the USB Flash drive after showing the Windows logo, you may have to run the following command to tell the firmware to boot the windows installer from the USB flash drive. This has been observed on the late-2014 Mac Mini but may affect other models as well. To set the variable:

How To Create Instulltion Media For Windows 10 On Mac
  1. Disable SIP by booting to the recovery partition.
  2. Boot back to macOS and open Terminal. Run the follow command and enter the admin password when prompted:

sudo nvram InstallWindowsUEFI=1

Insert the USB flash drive if it is not inserted, reboot, and select the EFI volume from the startup selector.

Note the InstallWindowsUEFI variable is cleared at each reboot, so you will to set it again if you do not select the USB Flash Drive.

Command Prompt and Mapped Drives

When Windows 10 starts up, it will prompt for installation of Windows 10. To open up a DOS window, press Fn-Shift-F10 (or just shift-F10) or click Repair Computer->Troubleshoot->Command Prompt (if available).

Once in the command prompt, there are usually 3 drive letters available: X, C, and D.

  • X: This is Windows that you are booted into in memory. The files from the boot.wim on the flash drive are copied to memory and then booted to.
  • C: Boot Camp partition
  • D: The USB Flash drive

Running Utilities

Within the Windows command prompt, you can run utilities on the Boot Camp partition.

Video

Best Alternatives to Windows Media Center for Windows 10

Windows Media Center has competed an incredibly important role to make Windows far more intriguing, handy and easy to handle media files, TV etc. Windows Media Center can be found in Windows XP, Windows 7 (all editions), Windows 8 Pro and Windows 8.1 Pro.

Microsoft has ditched numerous old tools and features of Windows in Windows 10 and Windows Media Center is one of them. Even after being an crucial aspect of Microsoft Windows, you will not get it on Windows 10, which is about to launch on July 29. Anyway, in case you usually rely on Windows Media Center to perform various things, below are a few alternatives to that for Windows 10.

Media Portal (Free)

It is deemed an open source free alternative to Windows Media Center for Windows 10. Typically, it is readily available for Windows 7/8/8.1 but, there is absolutely no offense to use it on Windows 10. The user interface appears to be very gleaming and it looks like the original Windows Media Center. The vast majority of options that come with a regular Windows Media Center are available in this free tool. You can play disc, TV, music, videos, images and anything else. This is certainly preferred because of its user friendliness and stability. When other tools consist of bugs, Media Portal run smoothly.

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Kodi (Free)

Kodi is yet another wonderful substitute to Windows Media Center for Windows 10. Alike Media Portal, this is also a free and open source software, which is designed for distinct platforms including Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, Rasberry Pi etc. As a standalone software, Kodi has plenty of rewarding options. Probably the most exciting thing is Kodi comes with some helpful add-ons, which make it even more constructive. Just like any other alternatives, you can watch videos, images, play music, DVD and so on. As Windows 10 will not have any option to run DVD, Kodi can help you a lot.

Plex (Free, Paid)

Plex has become the finest Windows Media Center replacement for Windows 10 mainly because it has some authentic features, what are usually hard to get in others. For instance, it can upload your photos to cloud storage, so that you can use and watch them from anywhere. Conversely, you can make custom playlist of music, stream video over WiFi on your wireless devices, watch latest movie trailers, let it track your music playlist and more. As this is available for different platforms, you would be competent to access your files from anywhere at anytime. Another brilliant feature is it can stream videos on Apple TV, Chromecast etc. This is a distinctive feature and it is not available in other replacements. Since Plex comes with a premium edition, you will not all the aforementioned features at free of cost. However, the premium edition start from $4.99 per month only.

Emby (Free)

This is the perfect alternative to Plex as a Windows Media Center substitute. Emby comes with loads of features at free of cost. The most important thing is this is a cross-platform tool, which is available for Windows, Linux, Mac, NAS device, FreeBSD, Android TV, Amazon Fire TV, Chromecast, XBOX 360 etc. Some of the important features are as follows,

  • Live TV – very easy to connect
  • Share shows with everyone
  • Cross-platform supported
  • Mobile synchronization enabled
  • Cloud synchronization enabled
  • Play every type of media files including DVD
  • In-built security shield

It comes with more other options and features at free of cost.

Jriver Media Center (Paid)

As a paid tool, Jriver Media Center provides tons of useful features. Alike Plex and Emby, this is also a cross-platform software available for Windows, Mac and Linux. It costs around $69.98, which is available for all three platforms. On the other hand, you can also purchase the single platform license, which costs $49.98 for Windows and Mac and $39.98 for Linux.

You can watch latest movie trailers, play DVD and do all the other things, what in-built Windows Media Center generally does. Apart from them, it has DLNA support, which makes Jriver more useful for common users.

MeediOS (Free)

MeediOS is specially designed for them, who want an attractive user interface. MeediOS generally comes at free of cost and loads of features. This free Windows Media Center alternative has many add-ons, what make it even more useful. The user interface is really illuminated. On the other hand, MeediOS can do all the basic things, what aforementioned tools doe. But, compared to them, MeediOS seems buggy and that is why most of the people look for another app than MeediOS.

NextPVR (Free)

If you want to watch live TV, play music, watch videos, check images etc. NextPVR seems to fulfil your demands by 100%. NextOVR is available for Windows only and you can download it for free. It was initially developed as a video recorder but later some other features related to Windows Media Center added to it. You can watch videos on HDMI supported devices. On the other hand, the TV tuner has the following device support,

  • DVB-S/S2
  • SAT>IP
  • DVB-T/T2
  • DVB-C
  • DMB-T
  • ATSC
  • ClearQAM

Although, it doesn’t contain as many features as other tools provide, but still this is popular because of gorgeous user interface.

Final Word

No matter, whatever tool you use to bring the options of inbuilt Windows Media Center, you cannot get so. But, you can surely get a glimpse of Windows Media Center, when this is not available for Windows 10. As the latest version of Microsoft Windows doesn’t have any such tool, you can surely opt for any one of them.