Did you try totally obliterating whatever partitions are on the USB drive? I’ve
sometimes run into trouble where there was some oddity with the partition table
and macOS just errored whenever I tried creating something new. Open Terminal,
note the USB drive's device identifier (that is, disk5, disk6, disk8, etc.,
either from Disk Utility or from the Terminal), unmount the USB drive, and run:
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/disk[USBDeviceIdentifier]
Note: This destroys all data on the drive. Please make sure you’re using the
right identifier so as not to destroy data on any other drive. Hit Ctrl+C after
a few seconds to stop the process, as it only needs to run for a moment to do
its job.
If that doesn’t help, did you try using Boot Camp Assistant? It can make a USB
Windows installer for you and you don’t need to actually install Windows when
it’s done. Such a drive should work fine on any PC.
Also, I do not recommend obtaining Windows install CDs from eBay. Prior bad
experiences and vicarious horror stories have shown that you never know what
you might get. Someone can easily trojan the installer.
If none of this works, I suggest trying another drive. Even a portable USB hard
drive should work, if only for troubleshooting the creation process.
Matt
> On Jul 26, 2020, at 12:22 AM, Carl Hoefs <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
> I just tried this command:
>
> $ sudo dd if=Win10_2004_English_x64.iso of=/dev/rdisk2s1 bs=1m
>
> It completes successfully, but the flash drive is rendered unreadable by both
> macOS and Windows. I guess I'll have to give up and buy an el-cheapo Win10 CD
> on eBay...
>
> -Carl
>
>
>
>> On Jul 25, 2020, at 6:15 PM, Carl Hoefs <[email protected]>
>> wrote:
>>
>> I am trying to write a .iso file to a USB flash drive to be used to install
>> Windows 10 onto a PC with a blank HDD.
>>
>> I've downloaded the 5.27GB 64bit Windows10.iso file (twice) from
>> microsoft.com, but when I use DiskUtility.app to "restore" the .iso file to
>> the flash drive (formatted as ExFAT & GUID), it always errors out with:
>> "Could not validate source - invalid argument". It sounds like it's trying
>> to parse the .iso file and can't (the .iso isn't corrupted). This is the
>> behavior on both Mojave and Catalina.
>>
>> Is there any other way I can do this on a Mac, or do I have to hunt down
>> another Windows PC?
>>
>> -Carl
>>
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