Installing Windows On External Drive

Post Reply New Topic

It's pretty straightforward to install a live (or sometimes persistent) Linux operating system onto a usb thumb drive, and I've got a few of these that I use from time to time, my all time favourite being a Knoppix OS with persistence. Always had the impression though that it's very difficult or impossible to do this with Windows.

Just the other day however I came across an installation program called 'Hasleo Win To USB' which seemed designed for this purpose, so decided to give it a go with Windows 8.1 Pro. What a bloody nightmare! I've spent most of the last six or seven hours trying to get it to work. The instructions are vague or nonexistent, the installation was aborted at least seven or eight times, and on the couple of occasions when the process apparently created a bootable usb drive, the OS crashed with a blue screen of death and incomprehensible error messages during the setup process. Eventually the Hasleo program and the computer refused to recognize the usb stick, which had clearly been damaged by the repeated failed formatting and installation attempts.

Then as a last resort I tried out the process on a twelve year old 60 GB Fujitsu hard drive in an external enclosure and to my astonishment it all went perfectly (didn't even think it'd work with an hdd). The OS boots up promptly and works properly. It's not ideal though, you don't really want to be carrying a fragile mechanical drive plus its connecting leads around in your pocket, and I just wondered if anyone here has found a straightforward way to get a portable Windows system working from a thumb drive?

I've never done this, but I remember a Youtube video content creator that I'm subscribed
to posting a video explaining the procedure.
I've searched through his videos and dug it out for you:

I used to use Puppy, I now use antiX.

Win 3.x can install on a flash drive quite easily, but anything newer than that, you're going to have problems. Especially once page files start thrashing around.

Also, as you've noticed, most Windows installers are designed to forbid you from installing on removable devices.

External HDDs shouldn't be a problem, since, if you have them set up correctly, Windows just sees it as a normal drive. Flash drives have a different architecture, and not all of them are capable of running as boot devices.

Thanks for the replies!

I watched the video, and it does look from some of the replies as if this can be made to work on a flash drive. Other commenters seem a bit confused though, and mention Rufus as an alternative option, but I thought that Rufus only works to create an installer device as far as Windows is concerned.

Anyhow, after Win to usb bricked my brand new 32GB Toshiba thumb drive, I'm not going to go down that route again for a while. The OS created on the external hdd is exceptionally impressive, and genuinely 'portable', as it seems to work with all my laptops, and even with my uefi firmware desktop machine in CSM mode (drive is set up for BIOS/MBR configuration).

No, evidently the feature to create a "windows to go " usb flash drive was added to Rufus version 2.0.
Read more about the procedure here:
https://www.intowindows.com/rufus-to-cr ... usb-drive/



In the past I've recovered a few usb flash drives that have been corrupted in Windows by
running the following command as root in Linux:

mkfs.vfat -F 32 usbDrive -I

Replace usbDrive with your correct usb device. Example: /dev/sdb1
This can be found by running the command fdisk -l as root.

Or gui apps like gparted and unetbootin will also show connected usb devices.

Well, there's nothing like bumping one's own thread after half a decade, is there folks?

I've been experimenting with Rufus version 4, and have found that it is indeed perfectly feasible to create portable Windows operating systems on ordinary usb sticks. I'm now using Windows 10 from a 128gb usb drive on a 10 year old Acer laptop. There are quite a few hiccups until the system beds down and gets updates, but after a few restarts it works very smoothly and responsively.