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#11
In the case of Windows installer ISOs, I obviously agree because MS doesn't provide hybrid ISOs. However, there's a fair number of other OSes that provide installers as hybrid ISOs, Ubuntu being one of the most well known ones, where one can indeed just write the ISO to a USB stick raw device and boot from it right away, without further hassle.
Exactly what I did, but as I said, it either freezes or reboots (and btw, you forgot about files too big to fit on the partition, that have to be converted or split).
However, since I'm doing it on Linux, there must be some differences in the process, resulting in failure. For example, I don't know what's the partition type Windows sets for FAT32 partitions. Is it the same type I set ? (i.e. W95 FAT32 LBA (0x0c)).
I absolutely agree, and I never said I copy the ISO file to a filesystem on the USB device, that's a rookie mistake. That's why I used the term "burn" with quotes, I was meaning to write the ISO to the raw USB storage device, the same way one restores a disk image. However, that only works if the ISO is hybrid, which MS ISOs aren't. Writing non-hybrid ISOs to a USB raw storage device makes for a non-bootable device. Windows still recognises it, being able to identify storage devices formatted in so-called superfloppy format (one single partition, no partition table, like floppies of the past), but afaik, no BIOS handles this properly, hence it's not bootable.