Glad to hear it! I only trust dd for .img files nowadays. The Windows media creator definitely creates a set of EFI style partitions so it probably has the installer on a pointer to the image in another partition, thus you lose parts of the installer?
Reminds me of custom EFI bootloader (coreboot) on Macbook Air, could have custom themes and easy other OS installs, but if a pointer got messed up, you had a few hours of trying to reorder partition GUIDs