Installing onto a tablet with a USB Drive as a HDD

grindboy

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Hi Guys,

I have an old Motion M1400 tablet PC (circa 2001). I'd like to try 8 on it but I have hit a snag. A little while back the proprietary (Thanks Motion) hard drive connector broke. Being the geeky hacker type that I am I internalised one of the USB ports and ran Ubuntu happily from USB.

Now you can probably see my problem coming! The installer doesn't recognise the USB drive as something it can install to. I've tried making a driver which spoofs Windows into thinking its an internal drive rather than a USB one but 8 won't load the driver saying its incompatible. Here's the tutorial for that: USB Powered Gadgets and more..
Any help would be greatly appreciated, it's really frustrating since the touchscreen works perfectly! Maybe someone has a portable workspace image I could nab? (Or not since I don't think it's in the dev build)

Cheers

Grindboy

[UPDATE] OK a bit of research later has turned up this article:

Creating Windows 8 To Go on a 16 GB USB-Stick « Borns IT- und Windows-Blog

I haven't tried it out yet as I've got a busy week but I thought I'd post it incase someone comes to this post looking for a solution.
 
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@grindboy: As the author of the article you have linked, I can state that Windows To Go created from Windows 8 Consumer Preview is just sufficient for a short test, but won't keep users happy. I wrote it in the comment section - first of all, there are some issues with thumb drives ( I will write a separate article about that issue - it has something to do, how MS uses USB filter drivers in Windows).

But the major point that drove me away from Windows To Go: The CP version doesn't allow to install updates or drivers (and this is worse, because graphics drivers are needed on most devices to recognise correct sreen resolution) - and there is no pc restore and pc refresh at all.
 

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But the major point that drove me away from Windows To Go: The CP version doesn't allow to install updates or drivers

In Windows 8 To Go 32 bit you can install a USB filter driver. Then the USB stick is recognized as "drive" and not as "removable disk". Then the updates work.
 

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Hi there
I installed Windows to go on a USB HDD -- works 100% so if your tablet could read a USB HDD then "you are in business". No probs whatsoever installing Windows to go on an HDD -- Do it exactly the same way as for a USB stick.

I used an HDD that I'd removed from a laptop when replacing it with an SSD.

In fact I think using a small 2 inch laptop HDD is a much better idea than a USB stick as it's not much larger, has a load more capacity, is much faster and not easily lost. You can use a SATA to usb cable so you don't even neeed to enclose the HDD in a case - now it's really small -- about the size of a small chocolate bar. !!!

Afterwards with Partition Wizard or similar reduce the size of the HDD partition to say 35 GB or whatever is sufficient for your OS and create a 2nd data partition.

I'm not sure what the video would look like on one of those tablets but I'm sure basic VGA mode would work in any case.

Cheers
jimbo
 

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I installed Win8 on a USB2 stick, a fast USB3 stick and a USB attached 5400RPM HDD. All worked but the USB2 stick was just too slow. The USB3 stick was the fastest. I have summarized my findings in a tutorial that you find here: http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/5349-windows-8-go-setup-usb-flash-drive-usb-disk.html

@whs: just a tip - instead of imagex I did suggest to use dism like:
dism /apply-image /imagefile:I:\sources\install.wim /index:1 /applydir:H:\

as I discussed at [1]). This tool is shipped with Windows 8.

Overall, I can't recommend Windows To Go with Consumer Preview. Maybe I have had not too much luck - but I've created 3 different To Go test installs. Using that install, the graphic adapter wasn't properly detected on two of my machines (on a netbook I have had only 800x600 pixel) - and Windows To Go refused installing updated graphic drivers (needless to say, also Intel graphics drivers offered from Microsoft Update failed to install).

After struggeling for hours with this issue, I installed Windows 8 CP from the same iso file on a internal SSD (on a slate) and as a .vhd-install on my netbook. On both machines the graphics adapter was detected properly, and I was also able to update drivers.

Also PC refresh and PC restore are blocked in Windows To Go. This behavior was also reported from several other readers of my blog.

1: Windows 8 To Go-Probleme bei USB-Sticks – I « Borns IT- und Windows-Blog
 

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Thanks for the tips. I did not really have any problems with the graphics. The PC restore and refresh I never tried. I don't really do any serious work with these systems. They are just experimantal testbeds for me. I was, however, able to do quite some fancy stuff - e.g. a video screen capture tutorial like this: W8 - 2 Start & Apps - YouTube And screen capture programs are pretty demanding on the system.
 

My Computer

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  • OS
    Vista and Win7
    System Manufacturer/Model
    2xHP, 2xGateway, 1xDell, 1xSony
    Hard Drives
    5 SSDs and 12 HDs
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