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Who Has Successfully Operated Win 7 From USB?


feetfats

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I am working on a project (just for fun) where my goal is to install windows 7 and some games onto a usb 3.0 drive and be able to run it from there.  I have had some success so far (but royally screwed up and have now started over). One big challenge so far is getting it to boot on USB 3.0 without bsod. I had to go into the registry (after booting in 2.0) and made some changes. I am just curious if any one on here has done this?  

 

I am following these instructions: http://www.rmprepusb.com/tutorials/win7onusb

Edited by feetfats

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It would be very difficult as each different machine has different low-level drivers for devices such as the chipset, so I would not be surprised if you encountered large numbers of BSODs. I'm surprised you got it booting on USB 2.0...

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It would be very difficult as each different machine has different low-level drivers for devices such as the chipset, so I would not be surprised if you encountered large numbers of BSODs. I'm surprised you got it booting on USB 2.0...

 

Off the start it seemed like this was going to work very smoothly but after activating windows things seem to go to crap. 

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Have you tried installing windows with the device in a USB 3.0 port?

 

I can load windows onto the usb with usb 3.0 but cannot initially boot from 3.0 because the fresh windows install doesn't recognize 3.0.  

To clarify this I am using 2 computers here.  Computer #1 loads the data onto the usb device over 3.0.  Computer #2 is the one that I use to boot from the USB device.  After booting from USB 2.0 on Computer #2 I had to make registry changes and then I was able to boot in 3.0. The OS was functional and I could even browse the internet. 

 

 

For my experiment I do not want to buy a legit win7 key so this seems to be causing most of my issues now.

 

I hope this makes sense.

Edited by feetfats

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Is this drive used in only one computer or more than one (sorry for all the questions)

 

I'm probably just making this confusing.  The end goal is for the drive to be used on only one computer but in order to setup the usb drive I use a different machine.

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That may be the issue - low-level drivers are hardcoded into the base of any Windows install; i.e. moving a storage device from one system to another will need a complete reformat (unless the hardware is near-identical), as the OS does not recognise the hardware it is running on.

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That may be the issue - low-level drivers are hardcoded into the base of any Windows install; i.e. moving a storage device from one system to another will need a complete reformat (unless the hardware is near-identical), as the OS does not recognise the hardware it is running on.

 

The software I am using to load windows onto the usb works a bit different.  If you are interested check out the link I posted at the beginning.  The os isn't completely installed in the first stage, its just loaded onto the usb and ready for first time setup.

 

I am now suspecting a problem with my external drive as come to think of it there have been other issues with it before, so I am now working on a different one.

Edited by feetfats

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Have you completed the section of adding offline USB 3.0 drivers?

 

Also this section:

Windows 7 does not contain many USB 3 compatible drivers - so if you try to boot from a USB 3.0 port it will probably crash!

 

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Have you completed the section of adding offline USB 3.0 drivers?

 

Also this section:

Windows 7 does not contain many USB 3 compatible drivers - so if you try to boot from a USB 3.0 port it will probably crash!

 

 

 

I have overcome the 3.0 problems by following those directions.  I now have some other problems

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