I need to install Windows 11 on a gaming PC, but I only have a MacBook in my house, as this is my primary machine for work. To make things worse, trying to do this on macOS Monterey is extra difficult due to the heightened security levels that withhold you from running unsigned software. I.e., most free tooling software. However, most tooling is provided by macOS itself. You have to remember the correct steps. And because this is not a process I often do, I decided to document it for easy retrieval, which might help others facing the same challenge.

As I mentioned, most of the tools are installed on macOS. The only missing one is the open-source Windows Imaging Library (wimlib). This tool helps you to split a particular file (install.wim) as it is too large for the filesystem we use on the USB drive. To install wimlib, you need to have Homebrew installed. Homebrew is a package manager for macOS. Some already have it installed, and some don’t, so I will include the install command for Homebrew.

Install Homebrew

Open a terminal window and run the following command:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

This can be a lengthy process. My recent model Macbook Pro took about 6 minutes to complete.

To Install wimlib, run the following command:

brew install wimlib

Insert a USB key that is large enough to contain Windows 11. I use a 64GB USB drive that can also store extra drivers. Newer motherboards are typically equipped with these Intel 2.5 GbE NICs, and Windows 11 do not have the driver built-in. If you want to store these drivers on the USB drive as well to be able to continue the Windows install process.

To discover which disk identifier macOS assigned to the USB driver, run the following command:

diskutil list external

The option “external” only displays mounted volumes. This helps you to spot your USB drive easily. In my case, macOS assigned the identifier “disk5” to it. Note the disk name. We need that for our erasedisk command.

Erase the USB Drive

The next command is going to erase the USB drive using MS-DOS format. Use a Master Boot Record scheme (MBR) as this is necessary to find all the files during the installation of Windows 11. We need to retain the disk’s name and use the identifier. The name is 64GBUSB, and the identifier is disk5

diskutil eraseDisk MS-DOS "64GBUSB" MBR disk5

Mount Windows 11 ISO

The next step is to mount the Windows 11 ISO, you can use finder for that and click on the file, but as we are doing everything in the terminal, the command you can use to mount the iso is:

hdiutil mount Win11_22H2_English_x64v1.iso

I’ve executed this command in the directory in which the ISO file was stored. You can execute this command anywhere but ensure to include the full path to the Windows 11 ISO file.

The main challenge of creating the Windows 11 bootable USB drive is the install size.wim file in combination with the MS-DOS format of the drive itself. The install.wim file is larger than 4GB and thus incompatible with the file system. To solve that, you can compress or split the file using wimlib. The Windows installation process knows how to deal with split files; thus, this is the preferred method, as compressing files impacts the duration of the installation process.

Copy files Windows ISO to USB Drive

The first step is to copy over all the files of the Windows 11 ISO file that we just mounted EXCEPT the install.wim. The easiest way is using the following rsync command:

rsync -avh --progress --exclude=sources/install.wim /Volumes/CCCOMA_X64FRE_EN-US_DV9/ /Volumes/64GBUSB

The progress option shows each file’s copy progress; the first volume is the source (the windows ISO), and the second volume directory is the destination (the USB drive). The exclude option tells rsync to ignore install.vim during the copy process.

Split Install.wim

The last step is to split the install.wim into two parts and place it into the sources folder onto the USB drive. To do so, execute the following command:

wimlib-imagex split /Volumes/CCCOMA_X64FRE_EN-US_DV9/sources/install.wim /Volumes/64GBUSB/sources/install.swm 4000

The key element of this command is the option “4000” this tells the command to split the file into chunks with a maximum size of 4000 MB. The MS-DOS (fat32) maximum file size is 4096MB. You can decide to lower the number if you’re comfortable, but keep it a little bit under the max.

Once this process is complete, you’re done. You can safely unmount the USB drive and use it to install Windows 11.

diskutil unmount /dev/disk5

During the Belgium VMUG, I talked with Jeffrey Kusters and the VMUG leadership team about the challenges of writing a book. Interestingly enough, since that VMUG, the question of how to start writing a book kept appearing in my inbox, dm, and Linkedin Messaging regularly. This morning Michael Rebmann’s question convinced me that it’s book writing season again, so maybe it’s better to put my response in a central place. 

I have some ideas for writing a book 📕 and I think now would be the best time to start with something like this. Any advice from #vExperts, the #vCommunity and existing #authors? Which publisher? What shall I prepare and think of first? Where do I start? 😱 pic.twitter.com/XysOqINJoC

— Michael Rebmann (@_michaelrebmann) July 30, 2022

There are millions of books and millions of authors, and that makes me believe a million ways to write a book. Here is what works best for me. Hopefully, there is something in it that will work for you too. 

Show up daily

The biggest thing you can do to help you succeed is to show up daily. I suppose this can be applied to anything in life, but it applies to writing books especially. The key to understanding is the level of showing up, i.e., your output. You simply cannot write thousands and thousands of words every day. You will have high energy days and low energy days. Days spent on research. Days spent questioning simple things that lead to rabbit holes such as this: “How much MB is there in a GB? What about Gibibyte? And which one will I be using in the book? How many tables do I need to convert now?” You will lose much time and energy on things that will not show up in the book. And that can have a demoralizing effect and give you a feeling that you are not making any progress. Especially when you are still operating under the impression that you must write a couple of thousands of words daily. And this is not true, at least not in my experience.

Showing up means doing something. This cartoon, full credits to @saraharnoldhall says it all. 

Add some words to your draft each day. It doesn’t have to be a lot. Sometimes you have good days. Sometimes you have bad days. People who have known me a bit longer and listened to my podcasts might know I suffer from migraines. Writing books while being a migraine patient is not an ideal combination. You cannot “send it” every day. So you have to work around the bad days. On my bad days, I try to do light work. I reorganize my system. Clean out the whiteboard, or if possible, I will remove the interrupts. Because when I have a good day, I don’t want to get interrupted.

Getting rid of interrupts

In 2019, I wrote an article about the three books that helped me focus, Getting things done, Essentialism, and KonMari. Getting rid of stuff, ensuring everything is in the right place and only getting the stuff you need helps you eliminate interruptions. Maybe you can’t do that for your entire household, but try to do it in your office. When you want to write, you do not get interrupted by things that need your attention. You can focus on the things you want to focus on. What also helps me to retain focus is music. Preferably music without any lyrics as that seems to distract me from writing, I’ve created a 33-hour Spotify list that helps me to zone in, but I know it’s not everyone’s taste. 

Tools

I use Evernote to store links to interesting articles and research papers to organize my thoughts. Grammarly heavily corrects my English, and I use Omnigraffle for my diagrams. Keeping organized properly is a timesaver long term. You will go back to your notes often, and I lost countless hours finding that one paragraph with that one datapoint that verified my thought. Safe everything, and label everything correctly. 

The last thing I want to say is just do it. Write that book that you wanted to write. Cover that topic from your perspective. Make sure it is factually correct, but add some personal flavor to it. To quote Rick Rubin, “Make what you love, whatever it is, be your own audience. So make the thing you love for you, the audience.”

More than a week ago Niels and I released the VMware vSphere 6.5 Host Resources Deep Dive and the community has welcomed it with open arms. The book is finding its way across the globe, from Argentina to New Zealand. To see the massive amounts of tweets praising the books brings us pride and joy.
Over the last couple of days, I have received many inquiries what it takes to write a book and if I could provide some hints and tips. I thought it might be an interesting blog post. Three questions you need to ask yourself

1. What is my core motivation for wanting to write a book?
2. What are you willing to give up for pursuing this goal?
3. Do I have the platform to launch the book and capture and maintain the attention of the book/brand?

Core motivation
The first question you need to ask yourself is why exactly you want to write a book? An answer often heard is not money or fame. It’s typically a charitable cause, such as to educate the community or a stepping-stone for one’s career.
The last reason is by far the most likely one that will provide you the return on investment. People respond differently to you once they found out that you wrote a book. It shows dedication, it hints at mastery of a subject, it differentiates you from the rest. Nay-sayers will automatically point to the option of self-publishing, but they forget that the leading word in self-publishing is SELF. You have to do it all by yourself.
If money is your answer, then I need to burst that bubble. The chances are that the same amount of time spent working at the local supermarket will be more profitable. What I’ve learned with publishing five books, is that the creation of a single page takes approximately 90 minutes.
The sole exercise of writing 300 to 500 words does not take 90 minutes. It’s the second-guessing, the formatting and the phrasing that takes a lot of time. Once you write something down, thoughts will start to flow; they will lead to more questions, they will lead to second-guessing your initial idea. This leads you back to vendor collateral, academic papers, or testing in your lab. And you will hit writer’s block.
90 minutes is a good number to work with when you are in the planning phase of the book. We wrote 569 pages. 569 pages times 90 minutes equals 51210 minutes. That is 853,5 hours.
Money
This number leads to additional questions. But first, let’s answer the money question, this intertwines with the platform question.
How many books does one sell? Duncan and I sold over 75.000 copies of the vSphere clustering deep dive series. I know that the early Bible of virtualization; VMware ESX Server, Advanced Technical Design Guide by Scott Herold and Ron Oglesby sold approximately 30.000 copies. Both are exceptions to the rule. Most successful self-published books sell between 500 and 1500 copies. Let’s say you earn 5 dollars per book, and you sell 1500 copies, you receive 7500 dollars before tax. If you spend 700 hours on the book, you will make a little over 10 dollars an hour.
Self-publishing books provide more revenue to the author than using a publishing house. Published books by VMware Press or any other publisher house will get you into bookstores. Unfortunately, this will eat into your royalties.
Deadline
Those 700 hours need to come from somewhere, and because you are writing a tech book, you are bound to the time limit of the software version. It doesn’t make sense to publish a book about the previous version of the software, so you typically have one year of writing. If you have a day-time job, you need to spend times in the weekend and evening hours. Let’s say you keep the weekends for your friends and family and household chores. That leaves you with five evenings to write. If you write 3 hours a night, that means you are spending 233 consecutive workdays to write your book. Question yourself whether you or your loved ones will have this stamina?
What are you willing to give up
So that brings me to the second question, what are you willing to give up. I’m not saying divorce your spouse, but if you want to keep your family happy, you need to get the hours from something else. Gym time, drinking time, game time or sleep time. Typically all of the above, because sometimes you will get sick, or other responsibilities will get in the way. Going back to question one, is this worth the ˜10K you probably make? When you want to use it as a stepping stone for your career, the money is just a nice bonus.
Platform
If you want to educate the community, or you want to get more exposure, then you need to have a platform already in place. This platform can be a successful blog, a popular Twitter account or you are a regular on a podcast. Due to the maturity of this particular industry (virtualization) you need to be a regular in the community to have people accept your wisdom. There are a lot of people sharing their knowledge, some not always as correct as they believe. So ask yourself, why would anyone want to buy your book? Why should he believe you? Are you seen as an authority on a particular subject by the community? Just getting a book out and expect people will buy it because of the subject is, unfortunately, a thing of the past. There are a lot of books about virtualization on Amazon and people need an extra level of confirmation before they spend their money.
Find your niche and share your knowledge! But, before spending a lot of time on writing a book and getting disappointed by the sales result ask yourself. Am I an authority on a certain topic and does the community share the same perception? A book can certainly help built this image. But in general, people already need to understand that you know what you are talking about. How can you become one? Publishing articles on your blog or LinkedIn will help. Appear on podcasts such as Virtually Speaking Podcast or vBrownbag. And speak! Speak a lot at local and neighboring VMUGs. Hone your skill, so that you can shine at VMworld.
You need to harvest that popularity and keep riding that wave. That’s why you need to have that platform. Otherwise, it will be a short 15 minutes of fame. Popularity has a momentum. People will forget, and the attention to your new book will soon be pointed at another new thing. You need to provide a platform that can maintain that momentum. Write about the book, publish sections of the book on your blog, speak about it in podcasts. This allows you to create better and bigger things after your first book, maybe a second one.
As with everything in life, nothing is self-contained. It’s always intertwined with other elements. This blog post is not to discourage you from writing a book, but hopefully, helps you prepare to launch a successful book. There is a lot of work that needs to be done before releasing your knowledge in the form of a book. Don’t let my words discourage you. To paraphrase Nike: Just don’t quit!