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Can I run windows off a USB?

4b33r
By 4b33r
in Operating Systems
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Posted

I want to Install windows on a 128gb usb3 drive but windows installer doesn't want to install on it.

Is there a way to install windows on a usb drive?

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You can use something like Rufus to create a Windows To Go drive, but running Windows from a standard USB flash drive won't be a good experience. You'd be better off with an external SSD if you need to run Windows from an external drive. 

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  • 4 weeks later...
Posted

Technically it's totally possible, the windows installer iso that you flash on a USB flash drive is an actual windows system, but the full installation of Windows may not like that the system drive is a SCSI drive on a USB bus, this might throw some errors, but in the age of UEFI and windows being more and more modern it should work fine. You'll need to format your USB drive like you would a hard drive, set up an EFI partition, etc, Windows might not like this, so you might need to use an another operating system. After that you'll need to manually deploy Windows on that drive (you'll need an .esd/.wim file for that with the full windows system, you can take that from a windows installer iso), then you'll need to install the bootloader to the EFI partition, after this Windows will be fully installed on the USB flash drive and it should boot, you might want to set up users and other settings for your new system.

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p sure theres a windows "portable" version , so that. 

The direction tells you... the direction. 

-Scott Manley, 2021

 

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