Installing windows 8 on a USB stick
So recently we saw the release of the windows 8 developer preview, within hours of its release to the general public i had visited the microsoft site and downloaded a copy to try. My original plan was to run the preview in a virtual machine to get a feel for it it. It didn't take long before i wanted to give the upcoming os a try on some actual hardware but i reached a predicerment i didn't want to duel boot, i didn't have a spare computer laying around and i didn't want to be swapping hard drives all the time so i set about installing windows 8 on my portable harddrive. now this may not sound impressive at first but if you go and try it right now you will find a nice message from Microsoft telling you that you are not allowed to install on a USB device (see below picture).
So my first idea for solving this problem was to install the OS to a standard hard drive and then image it across. unfortunately this soloution did not work as windows would then get stuck at a there was a problem with your hardware screen and request to do a repair but not find the os.
So now we actually get the the solution that i used and that worked for me quite successfully. You will need a computer powerful enough to run a virtual machine and some virtual machine software vmware and virtualbox are the main two. for my solution i used virtualbox and of course you will need your usb device to install onto. a portable hard drive is probability best.
To start with you will need to create a new virtual machine give it a hard drive of at least 20gb the rest you can assign almost anything you would assign any other virtual pc. mount the windows developer preview cd (download from microsoft developers website) in the virtual cd rom and boot the machine. Be sure to press whatever key you need to press to boot from the cd. (usually f12) start the installation process so that it begins installing to the virtual hard drive you gave the machine.
At the point where the system is about to restart (after copying files, installing updates, ect) take a snapshot of the virtual machine so that you can come back to it if you need to. while the countdown for the restart is showing mount your usb device into the virtual machine and mount a boot-able disc cloning cd. Also remove the windows 8 cd from the virtual cd drive. when the computer starts back up again make sure that it runs your cloning cd. if it doesn't boot that cd you missed your chance and should go back to the snapshot and try again. it did take me a couple of tries.
In your cloning utility simply copy the virtual hard drive to the usb hard drive. once that process is done you should be good to go. when you take your portable hard drive to another computer and use the boot from usb option you syhould be able to run windows 8. Every time you change hardware windows will need to configure the new hardware but it won't crash like it did with solution one. Be aware that because you are running the os from a usb device it will likely be a little less stable and a litle slower too.
I hope you enjoy using windows 8 from a portable drive and i hope to show you some of the features that i like about windows 8 in a future post.
