Windows 7 (yes 7) to Go ?? as per W8 to go. Anyone yet

[GMan]

Coke, when people take a normal HDD out of a machine and run it in another machine, it is very common to bsod on first boot but then on next boot, it works.

Going by that and how this may be similar - perhaps if you try to simply reboot after the 1st bsod - Windows might fix it automatically as in above scenario.

I dunno though because I don't play around with moving disks or To Go.

Other than that, the Office update likely will not cause bsods because they are not driver related at all. I suspect some other occurance going on with all of it.

 

[jimbo45]

Coke, when people take a normal HDD out of a machine and run it in another machine, it is very common to bsod on first boot but then on next boot, it works.

Going by that and how this may be similar - perhaps if you try to simply reboot after the 1st bsod - Windows might fix it automatically as in above scenario.

I dunno though because I don't play around with moving disks or To Go.

Other than that, the Office update likely will not cause bsods because they are not driver related at all. I suspect some other occurance going on with all of it.

Hi there
there is a difference in running Windows from a fitted internal HDD (swapping one disk for another is effectively the same thing).

What we are trying to achieve here is a "Portable" Windows that will boot from an external USB HDD or USB stick, handle roughly similar hardware and run as if it were on an internal HDD. This is quite different from merely making an INSTALL disk that simpoly installs W7 to your local HDD which you boot from that.

This product shoud work even if you REMOVE ALL the internal drives from the machine.

It obbviously can't include every possible driver otherwise it would never boot -- but it could have enough fairly common "generic" stuff and find otherstuff from the internet when required.

cheers
jimbo

 

[GMan]

heh heh I misread Coke's post - I thought he said its alright to install 7 updates but not Office - while in reality he said the exact opposite!

My bad.

 

[whs]

I can move both my stick with Win8 and an external disk with Win8 from my desktop to my laptop and vice versa. First time I ran it on the "other" sytem, it seemed to make some driver adjustments for a few seconds. But from then on the systems were portable and run at about the same speed as an internal HDD (from USB3). The stick is a bit faster than the disk.

 

[fafhrd]

Windows 8 CP comes with 1000 rearms - I wondered why - Has anyone using Windows 2 Go checked their rearm count with slmgr /dlv?

 

[GMan]

I can move both my stick with Win8 and an external disk with Win8 from my desktop to my laptop and vice versa. First time I ran it on the "other" sytem, it seemed to make some driver adjustments for a few seconds. But from then on the systems were portable and run at about the same speed as an internal HDD (from USB3). The stick is a bit faster than the disk.

whs, I *think* (just by logic's sake) that Windows will set the USB stick to be able to boot well to any hardware it has previously been ran on.

In other words, it learns the system and has driver settings well for next time it is used on that specific system.

It's only a hypothesis but likely true, by your explanations.

 

[whs]

I can move both my stick with Win8 and an external disk with Win8 from my desktop to my laptop and vice versa. First time I ran it on the "other" sytem, it seemed to make some driver adjustments for a few seconds. But from then on the systems were portable and run at about the same speed as an internal HDD (from USB3). The stick is a bit faster than the disk.

whs, I *think* (just by logic's sake) that Windows will set the USB stick to be able to boot well to any hardware it has previously been ran on.

In other words, it learns the system and has driver settings well for next time it is used on that specific system.

It's only a hypothesis but likely true, by your explanations.

I think you are right. Once the adjustments were done, it will go with that.

 

[Coke Robot]

Coke, when people take a normal HDD out of a machine and run it in another machine, it is very common to bsod on first boot but then on next boot, it works.

Going by that and how this may be similar - perhaps if you try to simply reboot after the 1st bsod - Windows might fix it automatically as in above scenario.

I dunno though because I don't play around with moving disks or To Go.

Other than that, the Office update likely will not cause bsods because they are not driver related at all. I suspect some other occurance going on with all of it.

With hard drives, yes, that works. I do that quite often when I do 7 installs on laptops. But on actual USB flash drives, no...that doesn't work very well. Windows 7 was never built for that.

Office updates never caused me an issue with 7 on a flash drive. It was the Windows updates, not all of them, that caused boot issues.

 

[Coke Robot]

Oh my! I completely forgot about this, Windows 7 Embedded Standard! That is the version of Windows 7 that is built for flash devices. I never got it on my flash drive, but it's a slimmed down Windows 7, I think it took less than 5 gigs of space. And it's exactly like Windows 7, everything is there and acts like it too. It's also designed to minimize writing too much on the flash as well.

You will need WAIK to deploy it though.

 

[fafhrd]

WES7 does not need WAIK - it comes with it's own preinstallation environment in the ICE Toolkit and the IBW. It can be made to work as a portable system from as little as a 4GB SD card. Windows Updates kill it though - they use up all the remaining disk space.
You need to specify the USB boot feature, and the write filters to preserve the flash memory, and of course no page file, so available memory limits what you can do, especially with 32-bit versions. It runs with reduced performance on machines with different graphics systems from the one it was built on.

There is now a WES8 beta version, but I don't recommend it - it does not work properly!

 

[Coke Robot]

WES7 does not need WAIK - it comes with it's own preinstallation environment in the ICE Toolkit and the IBW. It can be made to work as a portable system from as little as a 4GB SD card. Windows Updates kill it though - they use up all the remaining disk space.
You need to specify the USB boot feature, and the write filters to preserve the flash memory, and of course no page file, so available memory limits what you can do, especially with 32-bit versions. It runs with reduced performance on machines with different graphics systems from the one it was built on.

There is now a WES8 beta version, but I don't recommend it - it does not work properly!

You really don't need WAIK?

 

[fafhrd]

The WES7 SP1 Image builder Wizard has all you need. Product key link and links to download from this page:
Download Windows Embedded Standard 7 | Product Information and Trials

Learning modules and other resources here:
Embedded Development Tasks |OS Design OS Image Customization | Windows Embedded Standard 7 Top Tasks

 

[hildmc]

Windows 7 does have BCDBOOT.exe, it's located in the Windows\system32 folder. The commands for Win 7 are different than Win 8 though since Win 7 is not "UEFI aware", so it would just be "bcdboot.exe d:\windows /s d:" without the quotes.