How to create an UEFI bootable USB stick from an ISO

I have an ISO image of my backup solution's recovery cd. When I burn the image to a CD-ROM, I can boot from it in UEFI or normal mode without problems.

Unfortunately, this is no solution for my laptop, as it does not have an optical drive. Thus, I tried to create a bootable USB stick that can also boot in UEFI mode, but so far I have not been successful (note that the laptop has UEFI and boots Windows 7 in UEFI mode).

So my question is, if anyone knows how I can get said ISO on my USB stick so that it boots as if I would use a CD-ROM?

Solution 1:

Please clarify: can you boot that CD in both BIOS and UEFI modes? E.g. does it have two boot records in boot menu or a mode switch knob?

Preparing a UEFI-bootable USB flash drive is actually way simpler compared to an ISO, at least has been so in my experiments: a FAT partition with EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI which knows what to do next compared to specially crafted El Torito boot floppy image with the same crap.

Maybe you'll need to extract that efiboot image, mount -o loop it and extract the contents into EFI/BOOT directory.

Solution 2:

Rufus supports BIOS and UEFI systems.

You need to set the filesystem as FAT32. By default Rufus uses NTFS and that's not readable by UEFI.

Solution 3:

You should be able to simply format the flash drive as FAT32 and copy the contents of the ISO to it.

I believe that you don't need any further steps.