Installing windows 7 on an external drive. Installing Windows on an external hard drive. Preparing an external HDD

There is always an equal and opposite reaction to an action. Newton's third law.

There was a need to install a second Windows operating system on removable media. Hello corporate defense. It seemed like there was nothing complicated about it, but installing Windows 7 on external devices is impossible using standard means. We google and find suitable software for installing Windows on removable drives: PwBoot and WinToUSB.

Attention, this article is not about boot disks and flash drives with software packages or installation files! This is an article about bootable disks and flash drives with full-fledged Windows 7/8/10 installed on them.

Installing a second Windows operating system on a USB flash drive

After studying the hardware, it was decided to try installing the operating system on a USB Flash. I’ll admit right away that I didn’t succeed. You will need a flash drive of more than 8 GB and preferably USB 3.0, the speed of which is comparable to the speed of the built-in HDD. USB 2.0 is 2-4 times slower, so the operating system will be very slow.

Also, to install Windows, we need an installation image, preferably with a medicine, which I downloaded from a torrent (of course, only for reference and deleted it immediately after I finished writing the article). It turned out that PwBoot only works with install.wim, which is in the original image, but repackaged into other files in the assemblies. At least in 2 downloaded current cured Windows it was not found. In addition, there are problems in the future: after system changes, for example installing drivers, the system crashes into a blue screen BSOD. The problem can be solved by connecting the device to a working operating system and patching the system in the PwBoot program. Or run a bat file, which will start the service and edit the registry automatically every time the system is rebooted. The second option is preferable, but it’s still kind of complicated. And there is no suitable Windows image, too lazy to look for it. In addition to this, a virtual drive program is required to install the operating system image (for example UltraISO).

I also came across the WinNTSetup3 program for the same purposes, but judging by the description, it is an analogue of PwBoot and install.wim is also required.

WinToUSB gave an error - not enough space. Ok, let's try on 16 Gb - the same thing. Nothing is clear, there is clearly enough space. I couldn't find a solution to the problem in the search. Apparently I specified the system and boot drives incorrectly, see below.

I tried various variants of perversions for the sake of sport: formatting a flash drive as a usb hdd and just a hdd using rufus - to no avail.

Perhaps I did something wrong, or was not persistent enough. But the installation on USB Flash failed, so the decision was made to install Windows on an external USB HDD. The amount of hard drive memory played a decisive role. 16 GB is not enough for normal Windows operation.

Installing a second Windows operating system on a USB HDD

First of all, you need to split the hard drive on the floor into partitions. I usually do this using Hiren's Boot CD installed on a bootable USB flash drive. But in this case, you can use standard Windows tools, because the installation of the second Windows is carried out from under Windows.

  • Go to Disk Management via Control Panel -> System and Security -> Administration -> Creating and formatting hard drive partitions. And create at least two sections. The first 100 MB partition is called the system partition, it is used for boot files and will be hidden by the system in the future. Main and active section. The second – from 50 GB, the main partition, is used for system files and is called boot. Yes, that’s right: the names and purposes of the sections are reversed.


  • Next, I used the WinToUSB program, everything is in Russian. The only problem is to correctly specify the system (where the boot files will be) and boot (where the system will be) disks. The program installs the operating system directly from an ISO file, so you don't need a virtual disk drive. I installed Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate.
  • After the installation is complete, connect the portable hard drive to the computer (laptop) where portable Windows will be used or reboot. In the BIOS/UEFI we indicate booting from a portable USB HDD.
  • After installation is complete, specify the location and size of the paging file. I specified the path to the swap file of the first OS. Saves space, the systems do not work at the same time, the system constantly accesses the swap file and USB is not the best option in terms of speed.

Important notes from the WinToUSB developers:

  • Windows 7 is not completely portable. You may have problems with drivers when booting on different computers, so it is highly recommended to use Windows 10/8.1/8 to create portable Windows.

I didn't have any problems. The only thing that happened was that after installing the drivers, the system booted itself the third time. No interference. Just in case, run the bat file.

  • Windows 7 does not have native USB 3.0 support, so Windows 7 will have to boot from a USB 2.0 port. Regular USB drives are very slow.

The speed of Windows is quite satisfactory. I didn't notice any significant slowdowns.

  • It takes a long time to install and run Windows from a regular USB drive, we strongly recommend using a USB hard drive.
  • You must be an administrator on the computer on which you are installing WinToUSB.

Second hard drive for Windows 7/8/10

If you have a laptop, then a solution to installing a second operating system may be to install a second hard drive instead of a CD/DVD drive. This is the best solution:

  • no additional hassles with installing the system;
  • the ability to install an SSD disk, the speed of which is 3 times higher than the HDD - Windows simply flies;
  • no interference is visible visually - the hard drive adapter looks like a CD/DVD drive.

As if installing an OS is not something complicated, and my opinion is that it is enough to be friends with the computer and have two more hands in addition to your head - one right and the other left. To install the OS on your computer, you need or.

But what to do if you have neither one nor the other, the optical drive does not work, or you have a netbook? After thinking a little, I remembered that I have an external USB pocket for an HDD and a free old 2.5' HDD too. In general, if you have a pocket hard drive, you can make it bootable.

There are utilities for this purpose that can be used to do this, but I decided to use standard Windows tools.

There are a lot of descriptions and videos on the Internet, but, unfortunately, there is one problematic point that the authors for some reason omit. Well, okay, I'll start in order.

Preparing an external HDD

Before working with a disk, be sure to transfer and save the necessary information from this disk to another medium.

I will carry out all settings using standard Windows 8.1 tools. There may be some differences from previous Windows releases, but if there are any, they are not significant.

First of all, I want to note that making an external HDD bootable is much more convenient. I divided the disk into two partitions, one contains the Windows distribution, the other partition is for my needs.

1. We connect the USB pocket and go to Disk management.

Attention! All data on the disk will be destroyed!

If you have Windows 8 installed on your PC,1 right-click: Start/Disk Management;

If Windows is earlier versions, open the Computer Management console: Start / Control Panel / Administrative Tools / Computer Management / expand Storage Devices / left click Disk Management.

See screenshot:

2. Select an external HDD drive. Be extremely careful; if you select another disk by mistake, all information will be destroyed.

In my case, this is Disk 1. As you can see in the screenshot, the disk is divided into two volumes (partitions):

3. Delete disk partitions:

4. Create new disk partitions. One for the distribution, the second will remain for your needs:

Right-click on a free disk field and select the command in the context menu Create a simple volume:

5. In the Create Simple Volume Wizard window that appears, click the button Further:

Specify the volume size as 4404 megabytes and click Next. Please note that the size is indicated in megabytes. And since 1 gigabyte is equal to 1024 megabytes, then 1024 × 4.3 = 4403.2 megabytes we get for the distribution section (mine weighs 4.18 GB, for example);

In this dialog, you need to format the new partition (FAT 32), click Further then Ready:

6. After this, you need to make the created partition active (don't forget because the computer will boot from this partition), for this:

Right click the mouse and select the command in the context menu Make the section active.

We respond to the confirmation request YES.

The external HDD looks like this:

7. In the same order, we format the second partition on the disk, preferably in NTFS, but do not make it active.

Copying Windows to the active partition of an external HDD

Copying a Windows distribution to a bootable external HDD is quite simple and easy.

From boot DVD:

Open the installation DVD in Explorer, select all folders and files, and copy to the active partition of the external HDD;

From the ISO image:

By and large, an ISO image is a kind of archive. So you can open it using any archiver. You can also open the ISO image through Total Commander or Daemon Tools. Well, if you have Windows 8 or 8.1 installed on your PC, then open it with Explorer. Select all folders and files and copy them to the active partition of the external HDD;

That's it, your external HDD can act as bootable media. Just reboot and set USB HDD as boot priority in BIOS (depending on BIOS type).

  • When you turn on the laptop, press F2, to ;
  • Go to the tab Boot;
  • IN Boot Priority order install USB HDD;
  • Click F10, and then OK.

If it doesn’t work, then look at the article.

Save the changes and proceed.

As we can see from the text, preparing an external HDD for installing Windows is quite simple. And my description will not be complete if I do not talk about one problem that for some reason is rarely written about on the Internet.

Making the hard drive partition active

When I divided the hard drive into two volumes, for some reason unknown to me, not a single partition of the disk could be made active. This function was not available in the context menu.

The active partition is the partition from which the computer boots.

There are two ways to make a section active:

  1. Using the Computer Management console. We have already considered this method, but, unfortunately, for a number of reasons, the Make Partition Active command may not be available. The solution to this problem is also not difficult. Remember how to prepare a bootable USB flash drive from the Command Line.
  2. Using the Command Line, through the utility diskpart. The second method is a little more complicated, but more effective. You just need to do all the operations carefully and slowly.

Setting the active partition using the command line

1. Connect an external USB HDD;

2. Click Start/All Programs/Accessories/Command Prompt. Right-click and select Run as administrator.

3. In the window that opens, write the command diskpart and press the button Enter. An invitation line to work with the utility will appear – DISKPART>;

4. Enter the command list disk and press the button Enter. You will see all the disks installed on your computer;

5. We select the disk with which we will work. To do this, enter the command select disk 0, where “0” is the disk number in the list, i.e. for my external drive there will be a command select disk 1. Click the button Enter, the message Disk 1 selected will appear;

6. Next, you need to find all partitions on the selected disk. Enter the command list partition and press the button Enter.

7. We select the section we will work with. Enter the command select partition 1, where 1 is the section number in the list, i.e. for the section that we make active. Click Enter, a message will appear Section 1 selected.

8. Mark the selected partition as active, to do this, enter the command active. Click the button Enter, a message will appear DiskPart: Partition marked as active.

That's all. Good luck.

Also on the site:

How to make an external USB HDD (hard drive) bootable using standard Windows tools? updated: February 6, 2018 by: admin

Hello admin! I have a regular computer with Windows 10 installed on an MBR disk, a regular BIOS, that is, not UEFI. There is also a 1TB portable USB hard drive. Tell me, how can I install Windows 7 on this external USB drive, but so that the 7 has a separate bootloader and is located on the portable USB hard drive itself? I want Windows 7 to be a portable operating system that will boot on any computer or laptop that I connect an external USB drive to. On your website, but all of them feature GPT style hard drives.

Hi all! So, the question is clear, let's get straight to the point.

We have a simple computer with Windows 10 installed; we connect a 700 GB portable USB hard drive to this computer.

Computer disk management

Disk 0- this is a hard drive ( MBR), desktop computer with Windows 8.1 installed, drive letter (C:) ( if you have Windows 10 installed, then you need to do everything exactly the same).

Disc 1 is a portable USB hard drive, drive letter (D:), 700 GB, MBR. To install Windows 7 on a portable USB hard drive, be sure to connect the drive to a USB 2.0 port (black).

The portable USB hard drive contains important files and cannot be formatted.

Download and install it, then launch it.

In the main program window, right-click on the external USB drive (D:) and click on the “Resize” button

Move the delimiter to the right to free up free space (100 GB) at the very beginning of the portable USB hard drive and click OK. 100 GB is just enough to install Windows 7 (you can allocate more or less).

Click "Apply" and the program starts working.

"Go"

Operation completed successfully!

Launch the command line as administrator.

diskpart

lis vol (we display all partitions of storage devices connected to the computer in a list).

lis dis (we display a list of disks connected to the computer, we see that Disk 1 is our external USB drive with a capacity of 700 GB)

sel dis 1 (select Disk 1 - external USB drive)

create par primary size=100 (we create a hidden System Reserved partition with a size of 100 MB, on which we will place the Windows 7 download files).

format fs=NTFS (format it to the NTFS file system)

activ (make active)

assign (assign a letter)

create partition primary (we create a partition from the remaining free space, we will install Windows 7 on this partition)

format quick fs=NTFS label Win7(format it to the NTFS file system and assign a Win7 volume label)

assign (assign a drive letter to the partition)

exit (exit diskpart)

Disk management

Double-click on it and attach it to the virtual drive (L:).

WinNTSetup3

Now it's the program's turn.

We launch the program and in the main window, in the first field (Path to Windows installation files) click on the “Select” button,

in the explorer window that opens, find the virtual drive (L:) with Windows 7 files, go to the L:\sources folder and select the install.wim file with the left mouse, click “Open”.

Note: Please note that you can choose to install any edition of Windows 7.

In the middle field (Disk on which the bootloader will be installed), click "Select".

In this window, select the hidden partition System Reserved, size 100 MB, that we created in the command line (the system assigned it the drive letter E:), click on the “Select folder” button.

In the lowest third field (Disk on which Windows will be installed), click “Select”.

In the explorer window that opens, select the 100 GB partition we created (F:) and click the “Select folder” button.

Installation

In the "Use BootSect for boot loader" field, select BIOS.

Check the box next to "Allow native USB boot of Windows 7".

The process of installing Windows 7 begins on the partition (F:) of the portable USB hard drive.

And it ends successfully.

Restart your computer or laptop.

We enter the computer boot menu and select a portable USB hard drive to boot.

We are entering the final phase of installing Windows 7.

Windows 7 installed on a portable USB hard drive.

Disk management.

Installed in this way on an external USB drive, Windows 7 has its own separate bootloader.

On this computer, Windows 7 will boot from an external drive just like a regular operating system.

When you connect a USB hard drive to another computer or laptop, you will need to set the priority to boot the computer device from the external USB drive and Windows 7 will boot on this computer device, all you have to do is install the drivers. But I want to note that it is best to use Windows 8.1 as a portable operating system, since it is compatible with almost any computer hardware.

Many of you, dear readers of the “Computer Smart” website, have probably already thought more than once about the question: is it possible to install Windows on an external usb hdd hard drive? And most importantly - why is this necessary? This may be needed at least as an alternative to Linux. After all, in its environment there have long been so-called “live” disks (LiveCD), which make it possible to run a full-fledged operating system with all its capabilities from an external USB or DVD media. Such a portable system allows you not only to revive a “fallen” OS (operating system) on the main computer, but also to work fully. So why not try installing windows on a usb drive and use it in the same way?

Difficulties with usually installing windows on an external usb hard drive

But, if Linux can be installed on any device, even an external one, without much difficulty, then this will not work with Windows. Therefore, in the process of implementing the plan, difficulties will naturally arise, namely:

  1. Windows 7 will honestly warn you that it is impossible to boot from USB, and it won’t even want to install it on it.
  2. The Windows installer does not know how to cooperate with VHD (Virtual Hard Disk, or translated into Russian - virtual hard disk).
  3. When booting Windows 7 from an external hard drive, a blue screen BSOD error occurs.

An alternative way to install windows on an external usb hard drive

As it turned out, enthusiasts have long found a way out of this situation. However, one obvious obstacle remains - the relatively low speed of working with an external hard drive. This is due to the low bandwidth of the USB bus. The use of widely used flash drives is allowed, but their operating speed is much slower compared to a hard drive, especially in constant read-write mode. Also note that this type of operation was not provided in Windows 7. So it is impossible to give a complete guarantee that you will be able to boot from a USB drive on various personal computers.

In general, we will need:

  1. An external USB hard drive (in our case with already created partitions), or a flash drive with a capacity of at least 8 GB.
  2. A virtual machine, such as VMWare Player.
  3. Versions of Windows 7 Ultimate or Enterprise, since they support the Native VHD boot feature, as well as the PWBoot utility, which will help us do all the “dirty” work, namely, set up the correct installation and operation of Windows on a USB drive.

Although you can use other versions of the OS. But in this case, you should first install the operating system on a physical disk, and not on a virtual one. With this option, simply skip the console manipulations during installation.

The process of installing windows on an external hard drive

Let's take a closer look at the whole process. First of all, from the installation disk or its image, you need to rewrite the install.wim file located in the sources directory to your physical hard drive. This is where all the OS files are located. By the way, the standard ImageX utility from the windows AIK package works well with wim images.

The utility will unpack the OS image directly to external media, that is, install Windows on a USB drive. It will come out much faster this way. The only negative here is that during the first boot you will need to go through the standard Windows initial setup procedure:

  • selecting language options;
  • time zone indication;
  • creating a user, etc.

Agree that this is a small price to pay for future speed of work.

Naturally, you need to run PWBoot with administrator rights. When you first start, you will be offered a choice: installing a clean OS on a USB drive, or updating an existing system. Working with the program is not particularly difficult, but there are still a few nuances.

First, PWBoot does not understand the Cyrillic alphabet. If your Windows 7 installation image supports the installation of not one, but several OS editions, then you will need to choose one. How it's done? To do this, you can use the previously mentioned ImageX utility (the link to it was given above), running it with the info parameter and specifying the path to the wim file:

In the command output you need to find the Image Index item. Immediately after it there will be a description of the versions. In PWBoot, in the list for selecting the OS, the versions are arranged in the same order as in the command output (highlighted by frames in the picture below).

Secondly, you are offered two different installation options to choose from: directly to an external hard drive, and formatting is required, or to a virtual disk in VHD format. The second option with VHD is much more interesting. In practice, there will be only one file on the hard drive, inside which your virtual windows system will run and all your work will be done. The operating system loaded from the virtual disk will see your physical disk too. By the way, the speed of the system inside a virtual machine is almost the same as when working directly from the drive.

There are many benefits to using VHD. This format is understood by any program for creating virtual machines. In addition, its support is built directly into Windows 7 itself. This makes it possible to create, edit and mount VHD disks using standard Windows OS tools. This leads to some advantages, namely:

  • the ability to simultaneously have several Windows installations on one logical volume;
  • convenient and fast deployment of the operating system simultaneously on several PCs (personal computers);
  • ease of rolling back changes to the system, etc.

Or vice versa, you can place the installed Windows 7 inside a VHD container.

But let's return to PWBoot. So, we indicate that we will install windows on the VHD:

Next, we will need to indicate the location of the future VHD container and give it a name. Naturally, it should be located on an external USB drive. A flash drive or external hard drive must be reformatted to the NTFS file system (FAT 32 is not suitable due to its restrictions on the maximum file size of 2 GB). Don't forget to make sure there is enough free space. Then the program will offer to create a disk with a minimum capacity. But it’s better to allocate as much space as may be needed for installed programs, documents, and everything else. A virtual disk can be made dynamic, that is, expandable as it is filled with files, by checking the appropriate box. This means that physically it will take up only as much space as the information it contains. Naturally, you can enable this option in order to save space on your physical hard drive. However, in this case the performance is somewhat reduced.

Next, all that remains is to select the disk on which the bootloader will be installed (external USB hard drive or other drive), enable the Update bootcode and Add boot entry to BCD options, change the description of the boot menu item if desired, and click Install. The program will perform all subsequent steps for installing Windows on an external usb hdd independently. Usually the whole process takes no more than 10 minutes. Although this also depends on the speed of the selected USB drive.

Completing the installation

  • disable optional services;
  • remove components that you can do without;
  • disable hard drive indexing.

It is also advisable to refrain from any operations that may place a significant load on the drive. It is also recommended to periodically defragment the external drive by connecting it to another system. Another, as yet unresolved problem is the organization of the paging file. Of course, you can use the DiskMod driver, which allows you to create a swap file directly on a USB drive, or you can not create it at all. But it’s still better to specify its location manually on the physical hard drive of the PC on which you will use portable Windows 7.

In the picture above you see a picture in which Disk C is actually just an HD container physically located on disk E.

kompum.ru

How to install windows on an external hard drive? Step-by-step instruction

Greetings, blog readers.

Today I would like to tell you why and how to install Windows on an external hard drive. This may be needed when users want to evaluate a new version of the operating system. Or they need a shell in which certain applications will run. Depending on the needs, the method also changes. Next we will look at the main points regarding this topic.

Installation process(to contents)

Placing Windows 10 on an external hard drive involves performing a considerable number of steps. First of all, you need to prepare the device itself. So, to get a removable hard drive with an OS, do the following:

Now we see an unallocated area of ​​60 GB, which will be needed to install Windows 8 or a newer version. Now we need to transform the space into one that will be “normally” perceived by the system:


As a result, a formatted partition with the NTFS file system will appear on the USB drive. This is where we will install the OS, be it Windows XP or more recent versions.

WinNT Setup3 program (to contents)

After we have prepared everything, we can proceed directly to placing the operating system on a removable device:


It’s worth noting right away that such an operation cannot be performed from a floppy drive to an external USB hard drive. This is due to many aspects. So, to get started, just prepare a virtual image.

Installing Win on an external HDD for Mac (to contents)


Sometimes there are situations when users, for some reason, need to install a Microsoft operating system on a USB drive connected to a Mac computer. This could be a lack of highly specialized software options. Or simple interest. In any case, there is a way:


The instructions are not the easiest. Therefore, if something is not clear, you can find out all the details from the video:

I hope you can achieve the desired result.

windwix.ru

Using an external hard drive to install windows

We have already looked at the question of how to install Windows without a disk or flash drive. However, if you have an external HDD, you can use it to install the operating system. In this case, you do not need any additional software - just built-in tools and knowledge of how to install Windows on an external hard drive.

Preparing an external drive

All settings are made using standard Windows tools without the use of additional software.

The procedure will be as follows:

  1. Connect the external hard drive to the computer using the USB interface.
  2. Right-click on the “Computer” shortcut and select the “Management” section. From the menu on the left, go to the Disk Management page.
  3. Find the connected external HDD. Be careful - if you select the wrong disk, you can destroy important data from system partitions.
  4. Delete the existing hard drive partitions by right-clicking on them one by one and selecting “Delete Volume”. As a result, the entire volume of the disk must be unallocated area.

The next step is to create a new partition on your hard drive for recording the distribution:

  1. Right-click on the unallocated area and select “Create simple volume”.
  2. Specify the partition size in megabytes.
  3. Select a drive letter.
  4. Format the partition using the FAT32 file system, which is used on most flash drives.

The last step is to assign the section active status. This must be done, since the computer will boot from it. Right-click on the created volume and select “Make partition active.”

How to make a section active

Users often encounter this kind of problem: when they try to make one of the created sections active, they cannot click on the corresponding button in the context menu, since the function is not available.

There are two solutions to this problem:

  • Use methods for creating a bootable drive that work if you need to install windows from a flash drive. This can be using the command line or special utilities like Rufus, where installation media is created in two clicks.
  • Launch the Diskpart utility and use it to make the partition active.

It’s faster and more convenient to immediately resort to the second method:

  1. Connect the external drive to your computer.
  2. Launch an elevated command prompt.
  3. Type the command “diskpart” and press Enter to launch the utility of the same name.
  4. Display a list of connected drives by typing “list disk”.
  5. Select the drive you want to work with. By default, number “0” is the disk on which the system is installed. This means that the connected external drive is selected with the “select disk 1” command.
  6. Find the partitions of the selected disk - “list partition”.
  7. Select the partition that you want to make the main one – “select partition 1”.
  8. Make the selected partition active using the "active" command.

After exiting the Diskpart utility using the “exit” command, you can begin transferring the distribution files to external media.

Copying distribution files

The copying order depends on the form of Windows distribution you have on hand. If this is a bootable DVD, then simply insert it into the drive and copy all the files through Explorer to the active partition of the external hard drive.

If you downloaded an ISO image to your computer, then to open it you will need special software - Total Commander, Daemon Tools or any archiver. Mount the image and open it through Windows Explorer, then transfer all the files to the external HDD.

Your hard drive can now act as bootable media. True, to start installing Windows, you still need to properly configure the BIOS by setting the boot priority on the “Boot” tab so that the data is read from the USB HDD first.

After completing these simple steps, the standard Windows installation will begin, well known to all users.

mysettings.ru

Installing windows 7 on a USB drive

We remind you that attempts to repeat the author’s actions may lead to loss of warranty on the equipment and even to its failure. The material is provided for informational purposes only. If you are going to reproduce the steps described below, we strongly advise you to carefully read the article to the end at least once. The editors of 3DNews do not bear any responsibility for any possible consequences.

We have already looked at creating a Live CD or USB drive with Windows 7 and other software sets. This option is suitable for resuscitating an already installed OS, performing all sorts of service tasks (disk partitioning, cleaning viruses, etc.) and simply for quickly organizing a workplace. But these methods are not suitable for creating a full-fledged portable working environment. You can, of course, use a virtual machine - work inside a VM in the office or at home, and carry its image on a flash drive or external hard drive. This approach is obviously inconvenient because performance suffers, as well as the need to have an already installed OS and virtual machine on all PCs with which you have to work. Another option involves using cloud synchronization services like Dropbox, but this is not very suitable for transferring installed software.

Last year, one of my colleagues inquired in correspondence about the possibility of using the most obvious, as it seems at first glance, method. Namely, installing windows directly on a hard drive with a USB interface or some fast flash drive. Indeed, in the Linux world this is a completely common occurrence (another colleague has been carrying around a protected external HDD with Ubuntu on board for a long time), so why not do the same with Windows? Without going into technical details, we’ll say right away that Windows 7 itself is not trained to do this trick (except for the Embedded version).

But enthusiasts have long come up with a ready-made solution to get around this little misunderstanding. There remains, however, one more obvious problem - the relatively low speed of working with an external drive, which will be limited by the bandwidth of the USB bus. Of course, USB 3.0 looks much more attractive in this regard, but not all PCs are equipped with these ports. The use of flash drives is acceptable, but they are usually much slower than HDDs under constant read-write conditions. Don't forget to also make sure that the machine you'll be working on supports booting from USB drives. Please note that this operating mode is not provided in Windows 7, so there is no guarantee that you will be able to boot from a USB drive on different computers.

So let's get started. We will need an external hard drive or flash drive with a minimum capacity of 8 GB, a Windows 7 installation disk (Windows 8 is also supported) or its image, as well as the wonderful PWBoot utility, which will do all the “dirty” work for us. From the installation disk, you need to copy the install.wim file, which is located in the sources directory, to any convenient location. It contains all the Windows files. In general, you can work with wim images using the ImageX utility from the windows AIK package.


During operation, the utility deploys the OS image (in fact, it stupidly unpacks the archive) directly to a removable drive. This will turn out much faster, but the first time you boot you will have to carry out the standard system setup procedure: select language settings, time zone, create users, and so on. And this is a very small price to pay for speed.

When you launch PWBoot (with administrator rights, of course), you will be prompted to either install a clean OS on a USB drive, or patch an already installed system if you are somehow going to transfer it to an external drive. You will also have to “roll” the patch after installing service packs and, possibly, some windows updates. Working with the program is incredibly simple, so there’s almost nothing to tell. Nevertheless, there are still a couple of nuances.


Firstly, PWBoot stubbornly refuses to work with Cyrillic. If your Windows 7 installation image supports the installation of several OS editions at once, then you need to select the one you need. How to do it? Using the ImageX utility (see above), launched with the info parameter and specifying the path to the wim file.

imagex /info x:\path\to\install.wim

In the command output, look for the Image Index item and the version description that follows it. In PWBoot, the versions in the selection list appear in the same order as they appear in the command output.

Secondly, there are two installation options to choose from - directly to an external drive (with its mandatory formatting) or to a virtual disk in VHD format. The second option is much more interesting, but, unlike the first, it definitely requires Windows 7 Ultimate or Enterprise. More precisely, these editions support booting from VHD. In fact, there will be only one file on the disk in which all your work will take place. At the same time, in the OS loaded from the VHD, the physical disk will also be visible. Interestingly, the speed of the system inside the VHD is almost the same as when working directly from the drive.


In general, using VHD provides a lot of advantages. Firstly, any self-respecting virtual machine can work with this format, and its support is built right into Windows 7. You can create, edit, mount VHD disks and work with difference images (in fact, diff for an entire disk) using standard tools. This gives rise to such opportunities as the presence of several Windows installations on one logical volume, easy rollback of changes in the system, convenience and speed of OS deployment on many PCs at once, and so on.


You can, on the contrary, place the already installed windows inside the VHD container. In general, we won’t go into too much detail, fortunately this “trick” has long been known, and there are many good instructions on the Internet for working with VHD in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. And for convenient editing of the windows bootloader menu, we can recommend the BellaVista utility.


Let's return to PWBoot. At the next stage, you need to specify the location and name of the future VHD container. Naturally, it must be on an external USB drive. Please note that the disk must have an NTFS file system (FAT32 is not suitable due to file size restrictions) and sufficient free space. The program itself will offer to make a minimum disk size, but it is better to allocate as much as you need for software, documents and everything else. A VHD disk can be made dynamic (expandable) by checking the appropriate box. That is, physically it will occupy exactly as much information as it contains. In general, to save space, you can enable this option, but at the same time lose a little in performance.


All that remains is to select the disk where the bootloader will be installed (that is, an external USB drive), check the Update bootcode and Add boot entry to BCD checkboxes, change the description of the boot menu item if desired, and click Install. That's it, the program will perform further installation steps itself. This usually takes no more than ten minutes, but a lot depends on the speed of the USB drive itself.


After installation, it is advisable to lighten the system a little - remove unnecessary components, disable non-critical services, turn off hard drive indexing, and generally try to avoid any operations associated with a heavy load on the drive. It is also useful to defragment the external drive by connecting it to another system. The problem with the swap file also remains unresolved - you can use the DiskMod driver to create it on a USB drive, you can abandon it altogether, but it is better to manually set its location on the normal HDD of the machine on which our portable Windows 7 is running.


Volume C: is an HD container that is physically located on volume E:

Finally, it is worth mentioning an interesting development called VBoot. It is a bootloader based on GRUB, but with support for direct booting from VHDs. And it doesn’t have to be Windows. The site, for example, has ready-made Ubuntu builds. In general, it’s a ready-made and convenient solution, but, of course, it’s paid – from $79 per license. By the way, Windows 8 will have a built-in ability to transfer your entire work environment to a USB drive and boot directly from it. In the meantime, you will have to be content with the above method. Good luck with your installation!


If you notice an error, highlight it with the mouse and press CTRL+ENTER.

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Installing windows on an external USB hard drive

Many users of the Windows operating system have wondered: is it possible to install it on removable media, including an external hard drive? There are several reasons for such a step, for example, an installed OS on removable media will allow you to easily restore the OS if it stops starting. For the Linux kernel, this issue has long been resolved, and few people do not know about such things as Live CDs, which allow you to check the hard drive for viruses before starting the installed OS, perform various operations with the hard drive (setting sizes, formatting, etc.) d.). However, Windows and an external USB hard drive were, until recently, incompatible concepts. Now this issue can already be resolved, but only by performing certain actions, because there is no special version of Windows for hard drives.

Difficulties installing windows on an external USB hard drive

If in Linux the installation problem is thoroughly solved and everything is done using standard tools without any difficulties, certain problems may arise with Windows:

  • The OS will inform you that installation on removable media, as well as startup, cannot be carried out;
  • Windows lacks support for virtual hard disks;
  • When I try to start Windows from removable media, a BSoD (blue screen of death) error appears.

An unofficial way to install windows on a hard drive

Some experts independently decided to study and find possible solutions for such installation of Windows on removable media. It must be said right away that with such an installation, the read and write speeds will not be high due to the rather low bandwidth of the USB bus. But if you consider that this installation is necessary for solving certain problems, and not for full-fledged work, this drawback is not so significant.

Sometimes there may be times when you need to install Windows on an external HDD.

Perhaps the internal hard drive has given up life or the Windows installed on it can no longer be “lifted”, or maybe you just need a portable hard drive with Windows XP installed so that you can work on any computer without Windows installed or with non-working Windows.

This can be done in the three most popular ways, which are radically different from each other. Different installation methods are suitable for different external devices, operating systems and hardware configurations - so of course there are more than three different installation methods, but the rest are very complicated.

The simplest and most widespread:

Disconnect the internal hard drive, if it is connected (disconnect the cable from the hard drive to the motherboard and the power plug from the power supply).

Connect an external drive to a USB 2.0 port (USB 1.1 is very slow, and USB 3.0 can cause unexpected problems during installation).

When rebooting, enter the BIOS settings (Del or F2 key) and find the tab where there are BOOT parameters.

Set priority HDD - connected external, set priority startup from CD/DVD (1st boot: DVD). Press F10 (Save&Exit).

Boot from any LiveDVD and run a program like AcronisDiskDirector. Using this program, you need to create a partition on the connected HDD, format it and make it Active. Save/apply the changes made.

Reboot and start installing Windows XP from the installation disk.

Install the system as on a regular hard drive in a pre-prepared active partition.

In the second method, you don’t have to disconnect the internal hard drive, but then the version of Windows installed on it may stop loading.

Everything is done as in the first method, only the BOOTICE utility is launched from LiveDVD and an MBR boot area is created on the external hard drive (the value MBR is set in the program to “WinNT-5x”).

Another simple option is to download a special build of Windows XP, prepared in advance and optimized for installation specifically on an external USB drive. It’s easy to find such an assembly on the Internet; as a rule, it will have “USB” in its name (details for installing such an assembly will be in the distribution).

There are assemblies wrapped in an image that is rolled onto a prepared partition of an external disk using the AcronisTrueImage program.

The remaining options related to creating a GRUB boot, copying folders and files from the distribution to an external device, and other options are complex and require at least basic knowledge of computers and operating systems.



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