Vista on a usb hard drive

freshmasterfresh

I've got a Macbook Pro, right? I felt like playing some games... checking out some of that Vista 64, you know? Thing is, I've only got a 160gb hard drive and I don't feel like replacing it. There's not enough room for everything, so I copied my OS X installation over to a USB drive using SuperDuper. It worked great; I was able to boot from the drive and use OS X with no troubles. I want to do the same thing with Vista.

I've got Ultimate, so I used the built-in backup utility before I copied OS X back over to the main hard drive last night. I should be able to restore it from the image once Crysis arrives in the next few days, but I would like to be able to store it as a bootable installation next time I go back to OS X.

I've been looking into this, but there's a lot of old information out there. Plus, I don't want to have to reinstall vista. Anybody have some insight into this sort of thing?

PeregrineFalcon

1. Should be in tech forum if anything.
2. Doesn't work, Windows shits itself trying to boot from USB.
3. You can do it with a very limited preinstallation environment called WinPE, and there's some crazy fuckers who try to use it as a whole-hog OS, but it's generally a poor idea.

tl;dr - no.

freshmasterfresh

That's basically what I expected. I totally forgot about Moe's, though.

Thanks for the help, man. You're great.

NailbunnyPD

Actually, you can install Windows XP onto a USB drive by modifying some of the files on the disc. I never did it, but I did find instructions. I don't know if the steps would apply to Vista.

Also, BartPE>WinPE.

I found BartPE when I was trying to boot Windows off a USB stick. I found the other instructions as well, but BartPE did the trick, so I didn't need to mdoify the Windows install disc. It works surprisingly well if your HDD or Windows install crashes and you need to test the system or access the contents of the HDD.

UncleSporky

Actually you probably can do it, just not booting directly off of the USB drive. Even that is questionably possible, people have done it with varying degrees of success.

But anyway.

Do you know anything about VMs? Virtual machines that run as a computer-within-a-computer? There's a lot of software out there that does it, but I recommend Virtual Box. QEMU is another one that has worked decently for me. I don't know much about getting them to work on Macs, though.

It's a broad subject that I am not inclined to go into very deep, as it may not even be what you're looking for, but it's fun to play with. Not terribly good for playing games, though, especially the most recent ones.

There's also this neat program called TrueCrypt that can store an entire drive in a single file, including an entire bootable operating system. The whole thing is deeply encrypted as well.

Right now I'm looking at having a USB drive with a single encrypted file on it, that I can unencrypt on any computer, and have a full virtual machine OS available wherever I am. Neat stuff.

NailbunnyPD

Sporky, that's interesting. Would you mind PMing the software you are using to do it? I've tinkered with VMWare Server on my laptop, but launching a VM from a USB stick on a guest PC (like a hotel business center PC) would be pretty nice.

UncleSporky

NailbunnyPD wrote: »

Sporky, that's interesting. Would you mind PMing the software you are using to do it? I've tinkered with VMWare Server on my laptop, but launching a VM from a USB stick on a guest PC (like a hotel business center PC) would be pretty nice.

Virtual Box is the preferred free VM software of choice for most people.

But for doing this I am using QEMU as it is simpler, smaller footprint, and I've tested it and it does work if you configure it right.

http://www.h7.dion.ne.jp/~qemu-win/ - Windows version of QEMU (sort of experimental, it was primarily made for Linux, but it works)

http://www.davereyn.co.uk/ - QEMU Manager, a nice GUI similar to the one Virtual Box uses

I got both installed and got a small VM running to test it. To do that you tell QEMU what specs you want your virtual computer to have (a small 1-2 gig HD is essential if you want it on a flash drive) and just install any OS like you normally would.

Then I went into Program Files and just dragged the main folder onto a USB drive, and it works with no install on other PCs.

You may have to be using the computer as a local administrator though...but most XP machines are set up that way anyway, and locked down in other ways.

And then just to take that a step further, like I said, you can use the TrueCrypt software to encrypt the whole mess and keep it well protected from The Man.

Sorry these aren't very detailed instructions...it can be a pain to play with, so set aside some time to research when it doesn't work perfectly.

greeble

Linux boot disk such as SystemRescueDisk > BartPE unless you want to spend a shit load of money buying apps or pirate them.

(SystemRescueDisk as ghost clone, partition resizer, can read and write ntfs, can change nt password, has firefox, etc)