[CapsAdmin]

Last week I tried to make a bootable usb with windows 11. I tried using dd on macos, and that seemed to work, but the windows installer errored about "not finding drivers for the hdd". This threw me off because I thought something was wrong with the nvme.

Turns out you can't just dd a windows iso onto a usb drive.

You have to format it to fat32, then manually copy all the files. However there is one big installer file which is above 4gb, so you have to get some tool (also provided by Microsoft) to split the file into multiple files less than 4gb. The windows installer will recognize the split files and use those instead.

It's beyond me why the official windows iso just doesn't have this by default...

[nutjob2]

Don't know why you're being voted down, this was exactly my experience, and from all reports, correct.

But instead of the process you describe (which some tools will do for you) I used Rufus to copy the install files onto a USB formatted as a NTFS partition, working around the 4GB limitation.

[fuzzfactor]

Downvote-a-bots are not capable of actual thinking.

What you sometimes need is a USB stick having a native "geometry" in terms of HDD emulation ability, that will be recognized properly by the particular series of chipset on the target mainboard.

Then the data bits written to a fully-zeroed drive must conform to what is expected of a bootable device on the target mainboard, for one thing the partition(s) often needs to be well-aligned with the underlying storage hardware to a more particular degree than merely when it is a "perfectly" readable & writeable drive.

Many new USB sticks fail at this fundamental point because the factory partitioning & formatting was accomplished using an image not exactly appropriate after the vendors of the silicon storage or controller chips make hardware revisions.

Analogously, also why writing an IMG or dd from a not-very-identical stick, or with dissimilar partitioning and/or formatting is quite hit or miss.

Sometimes freshly reformatting is enough for problem sticks, other times they can not be made to boot without repartitioning. Either way a fresh reformat or repartition may simply overwrite using (proven nonoptimal) disk structures still remaining in place unless the device is zeroed beforehand. Sometimes a reboot is needed for an OS to forget the structure that was recognized during most recent insertion.

I like Ventoy (and Rufus) but for best results I start with a proven bootable stick which I prepare manually from a zeroed stick and verify bootability beforehand. Similar preparation when getting ready to manually write reliable plain Windows Setup USBs from the mounted ISO.

[RulerOf]

You can often format as NTFS and have it work anyway, but it depends on whether or not the system UEFI firmware includes an NTFS driver.

Rufus puts such a driver in its FAT32 boot partition and loads it before starting the winpe.

It drives me nuts that the UEFI sites never included ExFAT.