Creating a bootable Windows 7 installation USB stick from an iso in Linux (or, compiling ancient unetbootin for fun and profit)

I had to create a bootable Windows 7 installation USB stick from an iso image on a Debian Wheezy machine. This wasn't as simple as it should have been, because:

1. Windows installation media has to be NTFS
2. Current versions of unetbootin don't recognize NTFS USB media

The solution was to download source code for an older version of unetbootin (494), compile to allow for 64 bit execution, and then create the bootable installer.

The version of unetbootin in Wheezy's repos (and the current version of unetbootin) doesn't recognize NTFS drives and removed the option to show all drives. Older versions of unetbootin have this option, so we need to grab an older version (494).

Head to the download page for the old 494 version:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/unetbootin/files/UNetbootin/494/

If you're running a 32 bit machine you should consider a new computer, but you can just download the 32 bit unetbootin-linux-494 build from that page and skip the below compiling steps.

If you're running 64 bit, you need to compile the source locally as unetbootin doesn't offer precompiled 64 bit Linux builds (at least none that I found). Download the source tarball (unetbootin-source-494.tar.gz), unpack, install compilation requirements, and install:

wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/unetbootin/files/UNetbootin/494/unetbootin-source-494.tar.gz/download
mkdir unetbootin-source
cd unetbootin-source
tar zxvf unetbootin-source-494.tar.gz
sudo aptitude install qmake libqt4-dev
./INSTALL

Now you should have a unetbootin executable compiled for your architecture. If you want, you can install it, something like:

sudo mv unetbootin /opt/unetbootin-494
sudo ln -s /opt/unetbootin-494 /usr/local/bin/unetbootin

Now run unetbootin as root:

sudo unetbootin

Select your Windows 7 installer iso, check "Show All Drives", select your NTFS formatted USB stick partition (be careful!), and hit OK. When unetbootin finishes, you should have a bootable Windows 7 installation USB stick.

For more information on creating an NTFS partition on the USB drive and using unetbootin, see this blog post.

If you'd like to see NTFS supported added to unetbootin, please vote for the issue here:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/unetbootin/+bug/1125219