A friend of my wife’s asked me to wipe her old computer hard drive in preparation for recycling. I then suggested that they try to sell it instead, so Windows needed to be replaced. “How do I do that?” I’m a Mac user, so it’s been quite an adventure getting this to work. There are several guides on the internet, but it boils down to these steps:
- Download the latest Windows 10 ISO file from Microsoft.
- Format a USB stick with the MS-DOS FAT32 file system.
- Open the ISO using the Disk Image Mounter.
- Copy everything except the sources/install.wim file to the USB.
- Install wimlib on your system, I used homebrew for this: brew install wimlib
- Compress the sources/install.wim file using this command: sudo wimlib-imagex optimize install.wim –solid
- Copy the final file to the sources directory on the USB.
- Boot the laptop using the USB drive.
These steps took me most of the day to figure out. I went down several wrong turns, but in the end Windows was reinstalled. I hope this helps someone else.