Boot Win 7 from external USB drive

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WilliamJones

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Aug 19, 2018
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Isi ti possible to boot a full Windows 7 OS from an external USB drive? I saw some software that claims it can be done. It's called AOMEI.
I would like to boot from the external drive and start a new format/Win7 install on the external without changing the existing internal drive. Since I have lots of software, that will take quite a while, so when the external drive is done, I just make a backup and restore it to my internal drive.
I used to backup my internal drive, then format it and backup the new format, and then restore the original backup, but that takes up to 2 hours or more for each backup/restore using Macrium 7.
 
Windows 7 technically can be run from an external USB drive but it's not an easy task to make it work effectively. Sure, you can do it as I just said but the "effectively" part means doing it without having a bunch of problems because of the now portable nature of the OS itself in that kind of situation. Honestly I would just not recommend even giving it an attempt but that's me personally, it's not worth the hassles even if the final goal is just to have done it for a temporary shuffling of stuff between drives. I'd say get another external drive and do the backups as required then just do the proper install on an internal directly connected to the motherboard kind of hard drive or SSD.

One reason after all these years (basically forever) that I've always used smaller system partitions basically no larger than 120-128GB ('cause of SSDs nowadays) and then the rest of whatever media I'm using as my main hard drive or SSD is because it allows me to start over again quickly - with True Image or even Macrium Reflect I can make an image in minutes and restore it even faster.

I know some folks will use super huge C: drives and put everything on it but that creates an issue when it comes to doing a backup because you literally have to spend time adding all that stuff into the backup and if there's a lot of non-compressible data then it's just going to take up a lot of space. I prefer to keep the system partition primarily with applications and software (easily compressible to about 2:1 ratios) while the data (the non-compressible stuff like audio/video files) gets stored on other partitions or other drives entirely.

It ain't for everyone, sure, but it does make things much easier in terms of storage management for me personally.
 
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For future reference, I tried a few things and did get one to work. I first tried the free version of the AOMEI software, but it required the upgrade version to make Windows To Go work. I then tried some software called Hasleo WinToUSB and downloaded the free version. You need an ISO of the Win7 install disk, but it does work. It took about 15 minutes to complete the Win7 install and the external HD via USB did boot and it does work as advertised. One caveat that I had expected - After booting with the external drive, it is painfully slow. For me, this is OK as it is still faster than making backups of my current drive, formatting it and installing the new Win7, then backing up the new install and restoring the current install. Even if it's much slower, I think it is probably safer because if a backup failed, I would be out of luck.
 
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