I've seen some USB flash drives that have windows installed on them

[boe]

Does anyone have any good links/instructions on installing and running
Windows XP on your flash drive? I've got a spare 2 GB Flash drive that
would be very handy for this.

 

[Yves Leclerc]

Windows XP does not run off an "external" USB drive. You only install/run XP
from internal IDE/SATA/SCSI hard drives.

BTW: XP usually requires 5 GB.

 

[boe]

They are selling flash drives with Windows XP on them, there must be a way
to do it.

 

[boe]

http://www.tomshardware.com/howto/20050909/index.html

 

[NoNoBadDog!]

Does anyone have any good links/instructions on installing and running
Windows XP on your flash drive? I've got a spare 2 GB Flash drive that
would be very handy for this.

The BartPE is not a full Windows install. It is a tool to gain access to a
non-bootable system.
The other consideration...will your computer allow you to boot from an
external USB device?
Not many will. I would guess that your computer will not allow you to boot
from a thumb drive directly.

Bobby

 

[boe]

Just about all the P4 PCs I've worked on that are 2.4 or above let me do it.
While BartPE is not a full Windows install, I was hoping there might be a
way to get this. Ideally I'd like to have network access.

 

[R. McCarty]

You can't install to a Flash drive. However, it MAY be possible to take
an existing XP instance that is imaged and restore the image to the flash
drive. Boot ability would depend on BIOS and how it maps drive letters.
You'd probably have some letter assignment issues and the change in
Mass Storage controller could conceivably trigger an Activation request.
This topic comes up from time to time and I've never seen a definitive
document where it has been shown to work. Of course one of biggest
issues is "Trimming" back an XP instance to fit on a 2.0 Gig drive. Also,
with the speed of Flash, even on USB2.0 the performance won't be very
good at all. (24 Megabytes per Second).

 

[NoNoBadDog!]

I think you are confused...While you can access the USB Drive from a
computer, it is not the same as "running" windows. For instance, you will
have no pagefile on the thumbdrive. In addition, you would have to have the
drivers for the NIC on the thumbdrives, and there would have to be a folder
for your TIF from IE. In addition, most websites now require additional
software, such as flash or java, to see the content of their sites. This
would need to be installed to the thumbdrive *after* windows is accessed.

Even if you could get a true boot from a thumb drive as opposed to a Preboot
Environment, it would be terribly slow and unstable.

Just about all P4 PCs will let you access the thumbdrive without booting to
windows. This is not the same as booting from the thumbdrive. The two are
completely different.

What you are asking, a full operational windows environment from a thumb
drive, just can't be done.

Bobby

 

[boe]

A challenge is it!?! JK - hopefully someone smarter than I can figure out
what I want.

Basically my goal is to use my flash drive for a more windows like
environment for systems that won't boot. I've used a few different types of
Linux ERDs in the past such as knoppix but a windows XP boot flash drive
that gives me the more familiar windows environment so I can just map a
network drive, copy the files off the PC to the server in the event I can't
get it to boot would be very nice.