Can't boot Windows USB drive

Unfortunately I need to install Windows because of the uni.
I had my laptop with preinstalled windows, so all I need to do is download Win ISO and install it.
I made a boot flashdrive with WoeUSB

I restarted laptop, entered BIOS by pressing F1, but it just doesn’t see my flashdrive. Also, weirdly, it sees 2 boot options and they are both Fedora. I would like to take a picture of that, but now after an hour of rebooting and trying to install windows now I can’t even enter BIOS anymore for some reason. F1 doesn’t work anymore, F11, F12 are not working either. ESC now just give you terminal loading screen and that’s it.

Maybe someone here had something similar or at least now how can I check what’s wrong.

If the flash drive was bootable it should see it. Maybe you should look at how you downloaded the iso to put on the flash drive as well as how it was written to the flash drive. See if the flash drive can be booted on a different machine to confirm if it is or is not bootable.

The change in the bios access sounds like the way windows enables fast boot which blocks both access to bios and the grub menu.

That image does not look like any windows USB I have ever seen. My iso for Windows 10 (Win10-21H1.iso) shows this.

# mount Win10-21H1.iso /mnt
mount: /mnt: WARNING: source write-protected, mounted read-only.
[root@eagle ISOs]# ls -l /mnt
total 2008
-r--r--r--.  1 nobody nobody     128 Apr  9  2021 autorun.inf
dr-xr-xr-x.  5 nobody nobody     564 Apr  9  2021 boot
-r--r--r--.  1 nobody nobody  413738 Apr  9  2021 bootmgr
-r--r--r--.  1 nobody nobody 1541648 Apr  9  2021 bootmgr.efi
dr-xr-xr-x.  4 nobody nobody     148 Apr  9  2021 efi
-r--r--r--.  1 nobody nobody   74184 Apr  9  2021 setup.exe
dr-xr-xr-x. 12 nobody nobody   12440 Jul 30  2021 sources
dr-xr-xr-x.  3 nobody nobody      96 Apr  9  2021 support

That iso is bootable and was used to install windows 10 into a VM on my host.

A current download of windows 10 from microsoft gives an iso that is bootable
Win10_21H2_English_x64.iso
and it can easily be written to a usb with dd or fedora media writer and would then be a natural install media without using WoeUSB to create it.

Since it appears you may be running fedora on the host maybe you could simply install windows into a VM (or maybe not for licensing reasons)

Looks like you are trying dual boot Windows and Fedora.

The easiest way is to install Windows first, then shrink the volume of the windows installed to give space for Fedora and then install Fedora in the free space. Remember, you have to also disable fastboot in windows to allow fedora to access windows folders without any issues.

+1

You will encounter major issues if you install windows after fedora is already installed. Windows is greedy and wipes out the ability of fedora to boot.

Fedora, OTOH is happy to share with windows if it is installed later.

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