trouble installing windows with woeusb on partition - not an entire storage device

Question

I already installed woeusb. I created a ~150GB partition formatted as ntfs. It currently doesn't have a mount point. I'm trying to dual boot Windows from Ubuntu, and the laptop initally came with windows boot loader and the whole shabang- lenovo yoga pro 13. Here's the output of lsblk:

lsblk
NAME        MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
loop0         7:0    0     4K  1 loop /snap/bare/5
loop1         7:1    0 219.2M  1 loop /snap/code/97
loop2         7:2    0  65.2M  1 loop /snap/gtk-common-themes/1519
loop3         7:3    0  81.3M  1 loop /snap/gtk-common-themes/1534
loop4         7:4    0 227.7M  1 loop /snap/code/96
loop5         7:5    0 248.8M  1 loop /snap/gnome-3-38-2004/99
loop6         7:6    0 164.8M  1 loop /snap/gnome-3-28-1804/161
loop7         7:7    0  44.7M  1 loop /snap/snapd/15904
loop8         7:8    0 110.6M  1 loop /snap/core/12834
loop9         7:9    0  54.2M  1 loop /snap/snap-store/558
loop10        7:10   0  44.7M  1 loop /snap/snapd/15534
loop11        7:11   0  55.5M  1 loop /snap/core18/2409
loop12        7:12   0  61.9M  1 loop /snap/core20/1494
loop13        7:13   0  61.9M  1 loop /snap/core20/1434
loop14        7:14   0 111.7M  1 loop /snap/core/13250
loop15        7:15   0 169.4M  1 loop /snap/spotify/60
loop16        7:16   0   5.5G  1 loop /media/elle/CCCOMA_X64FRE_EN-US_DV9
sdc           8:32   1  14.6G  0 disk 
└─sdc1        8:33   1  14.6G  0 part /media/elle/windows
nvme0n1     259:0    0   477G  0 disk 
├─nvme0n1p1 259:1    0   512M  0 part /boot/efi
├─nvme0n1p2 259:2    0 320.2G  0 part /
└─nvme0n1p3 259:3    0 156.3G  0 part

I tried to follow the tutorial here: https://opensource.com/article/21/2/linux-woeusb. Here's the output of Woeusb:

sudo ./woeusb-5.2.4.bash --target-filesystem NTFS --device Win10_21H2_English_x64.iso  /dev/nvme0n1p3
WoeUSB v5.2.4
==============================
ERROR: Target media "/dev/nvme0n1p3" is not an entire storage device!

Here's a screenshot of gparted: GPARTED

Only including an image because I can't copy paste it really lol.

If anyone has any ideas, or if I actually should have mounted it before I tried, let me know. When I try the command but on the flash drive instead of the partition it gives me:

ERROR: Target media "/media/(name)/windows" is not a block device file!

woeusb expects an external drive as target device (typically a USB drive with at least 8 GB), not a partition on the internal drive. The next step is to boot from the installer that woeusb created on the USB drive, and from there Windows can be installed into the internal drive. See also this link. — sudodus, May 30 '22 at 09:31
If you have Windows already installed alongside Ubuntu, and for some reason cannot boot into it, the first step would be to boot into Ubuntu and run sudo update-grub, which should find Windows and create a menuentry for it in the grub menu. — sudodus, May 30 '22 at 09:39
clarification: I had windows installed, but opted to clear the entire drive upon installing ubuntu, so there are no remnants of windows remaining, sorry for the confusion. I already tried the usb drive, as my original post states. — Amy S, May 30 '22 at 13:31
Maybe you have better luck with the tool mkusb instead of woeusb. It can create a Windows installer in a USB drive with size >= 8 GB. — sudodus, May 30 '22 at 13:38

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered May 30 '22 at 09:35

WoeUSB is designed to create UEFI bootable USB sticks. Therefore WoeUSB needs to create at least 2 partitions on the target device. This is way the WoeUSB, fails with "... media "/dev/nvme0n1p3" is not an entire storage device!".

If you want dual boot to work, you need to chainload the Windows UEFI boot loader.

e.g. in /etc/grub.d/40_custom add something like

menuentry 'Windows 10' {
    search --fs-uuid --no-floppy --set=root CC66-4B02
    chainloader (${root})/EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi
}

trouble installing windows with woeusb on partition - not an entire storage device

1 Answers1