Install and Run Portable Windows 7/8/10 Off a Live USB Flash Drive

In today's Software Sunday segment I am going to show you how to create a live installation of Windows 7/8/10 on a USB flash drive using WinToUSB. WinToUSB allows the user to create portable Windows installations on practically any USB storage medium.

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[singularity]

thumbs up for the first wintousb with an actual speaking person.
It would be helpful for you to explain the three partition schemes, and the difference among legacy/vhd/vhdx, etc..

[someguy]

Thanks, been trying to do this for ages worked as described. Also thanks for the "PLOP", this will come in handy too.

[chiestpanda]

05:02 <--- OMG the best tip I've ever found in a video, thank you! I've yet to try it but I know exactly what you mean and was actually the reason I was searching whether or not it would be possible to run windows from a USB drive so I'm going to give this a try and see if it works, but thanks for including this!

[therealjammit]

Interesting. Here's the trick I used.
I didn't have Win 10, but Win 7 and the free "upgrade" to Windows 10 (legit from Microsoft). WinToUSB did install Win 7 to a USB drive, but Win 7 would fail to boot (I probably needed a special driver for USB because my Win 7 was too old).

I installed Win 7 on a SATA HD with a CD.
Registered and updated Win 7.
Used the free upgrade to install Win 10 over the internet.
Win 10 was automatically registered.
Installed all updates to Win 10.
Shut down and removed SATA drive.
Installed SATA drive in a USB3 enclosure.
Booted off the USB3 enclosure.

I plan on trying to use "Gparted" to clone Win 10 on the SATA onto a USB thumb drive. If it boots I'll then re-register Win 10 which will automatically (via Microsoft's online activation) de-register the SATA install.

[readme_nfo]

i did the same thing you explained for getting windows 10 with the enclosure for macs when they're underspec'd for a particular version of OS X lol

[PuterExpertCustomPrinting]

great video I already use wintousb for doing what you showed here but sometimes I forget the process so this video is a good recap on how to install windows to usb.thanks for doing this video

[iatrica]

Thanks for the vídeo. It gelped me a
For those whith difficulties do not forget to change UEFI to legacy on BIOS.

[nathanwillyerd]

Excellent tutorial! I used this to boot into a Surface Pro 5 that wouldn't boot from the internal storage so I could recover files. Despite using a USB 3 SSD and the internal storage being SSD it did still take quite a bit of time to boot up from it but it still did the job! Thank you so much for the tutorial!

[jamesbrandon]

My first time doing a clean install of windows 10, I accidentally designated it to the usb it was on 🤔 when I removed the usb it did not boot windows. When I plugged the usb back in and restarted my the PC, windows booted directly from the usb. I Iaughed when I realized what I've done😂, I didn't even know that it was possible to have a live copy to carry around.

[pinkipromise]

freshinstall on a ssd also makes it usable on usb to sata adapter on any computers

[wrzq]

Beautiful tutorial, thank you so much for making this vid.

[nadien]

I'v tried this before (Win10 64 bit) only to find that the machine i tried to run it (MSI KT8 NEO2 w/Athlon 64 FX) on would not, even though it runs Win 7 Pro 64 bit just fine. And by the way it does run Win10 32 bit without a problem.

[killertruth]

Software Sunday on a Saturday? Edit* I just realized that someone else did made that comment before me.

[jurabekabraev]

Thank you for the tutorial! I couldn't understand the last part. I have installed the windows 8 on my pc and it runs. But how to use that SATA or something?

[PhilJLF]

Had to install 3 different bootable Linux distros to a USB for one of our college network admin & security labs

[dylanlindsay]

awesome tutorial i tried this using rufus usb tool and it took almost 3 hours just to copy the files to the usb and i was using a usb 3.0 drive plugged into a usb 3.0 port then the installer got stuck on getting ready and crashed...

[MartinPaoloni]

Welcome to Software Sunday... On a Saturday. 🤣

[ScrapTechTips]

Can you go through how to install windows 2016 data centre server as I need to know

[mysteryguy]

I have a problem with booting win 7. It's stopl loading at disk.sys. And I'm doing it an an brand new laptop with win 11.

[HangingWithDan]

So at 5:00 you are cloning your live windows 10 usb flash drive to a hard drive in an enclosure and then using that hard drive in another computer or the same computer to run windows 10? Am I correct?