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Can Win7 be run off a usb HDD

  • 25-11-2009 12:09am
    #1
    lpm
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 49 ✭


    When I try it tells me no but wondered if anyone came across an easy to follow tutorial that works

    Thanks


Comments

  • #2
    Capt'n Midnight
    Moderators, Recreation & Hobbies Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Technology & Internet Moderators Posts: 93,582 Mod ✭✭✭✭Capt'n Midnight


    Because of licensing issues windows is not designed to run from removable drives , ALL of the problems you will have stem from this.

    OEM license is bound to the motherboard, Other versions are bound to the hard drive. In Vista it's bound to ONE partition on the hard drive. In practise this means you probably need another windows license to run on an external drive and if using OEM you can't use the drive on any other machine.

    Windows NT-2000-XP-Vista-7 all blue screen of death if you try to load the wrong HAL or hard drive controller so you can't move them between different machines without a lot of knudges under the bonnet. If you do boot then you have fun with video drivers. 16 bit versions of windows just went in to a found new hardware dance and as long as you fed them drivers they would boot up eventually.


    Far simplier to have an OS that is portable like most non-windows OS's acting as the host for a windows virtual machine, the host OS takes care of booting up on all sorts of hardware that the guest OS would have a hissy fit at.

    Note: when you authenticate a windows vm it will probably un-authenticate any other copy of windows with the same serial because of the licensing rules, you are supposed to have a license for each copy. There may be a way of having the VM reuse the UUID of the bios of the PC it was first installed on so that authentication is not triggered but that would only apply when running the VM on the original machine as host / guest instead of just a guest. VM has many limitations like it can only use USB ports, but only as 1.1 or something.




    If you just want an OS for browsing/file recovery than any of the live linux ones are worth a look.


  • #3
    joe_elway
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 170 ✭✭joe_elway


    If you have an eSATA socket you can install Windows onto an eSATA caddy drive. I've got Windows Server 2008 R2/Hyper-V installed and running that way so I don't have to sacrifice space on the internal drive (Windows 7).

    Just don't go moving the disk from machine to machine. It'll not end well.


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