How to create an UEFI-bootable Windows 7 stick from Linux.

In case you rely on Windows-only software or want to play a game that isn't on Linux yet, you might want to keep Windows 7 on a second partition. Although I didn't use it for months, I still keep one around just in case.

Unfortunately, it's not really straightforward to create a UEFI bootable USB installation disk without using Windows. For some strange reason we can't just dd the ISO image to a USB disk. Instead, we need to use the Windows USB/DVD Download Tool which - incidentally - only runs on Windows.

However, there's also a way to do this from Linux:

First, you need to create a GPT partition table with a FAT32 partition on your USB pen drive. Then you simple mount the ISO file and copy the files over. After you've done that, your need to extract the file 1/Windows/Boot/EFI/bootmgfw.efi from the install.wim file inside /sources folder on the Windows 7 installation ISO and move the extracted file to /EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi on the pen drive.

You don't have to do this manually: There's a neat little tool called WinUSB that can do this for you (it even has a GUI if you want it) and my pull request) that adds Windows 7 UEFI support support has just been merged.