How To Boot Windows 10 From An External SSD Or Hard Drive Quick And Easy

with the new steam deck coming out a lot of people are wondering if you can install windows on an external ssd or hard drive i don't know why you would want to use a hard drive for that but today i'm going to show you guys how to install windows on an external ssd hard drive ssd enclosure any of that really quick really easy for this we're using a samsung t7 500 gigabyte external ssd this thing is super fast super reliable i think i got it for like 70 from best buy if you're looking for something that's you know nice and slim and easy to carry it actually looks pretty good this is this is probably a good one to get if you have like random nvme storage laying around like you have like some 500 gigabyte m.2 nvme that you pulled out of a random build you can use a external ssd enclosure like this one all you have to do is pull it out and there's you can put any kind of ssd in here obviously this one has kind of a smaller 2230 form factor so it doesn't fit quite right but you can use an external drive like this over usb you're going to max out whatever the usb bus can do so if you have like a usb type c on your motherboard or on your steam deck it will max out at whatever speed that is like this ssd is like 3 500 megabytes per second it's super fast but i doubt that the steam decks built-in type c is going to be that fast or even the usb type-c that's on your motherboard is going to be that fast unless it's like thunderbolt so keep that in mind when buying a external ssd you don't need it to be super fast it just has to be faster than whatever usb bus that you're using it on some of you watching might think hey i've seen this video before but some people in the comments pointed out things that i could have done better and i feel like it's more efficient for me to just repost the video as a more efficient process sometimes i do things that are a little bit out of order or probably could be more efficient but it's not wrong information it's just there's more steps involved than you really need so normally when you install windows 10 on a computer you boot a flash drive you plug it in and then when you start up the pc it will boot off of that flash drive and then let you install windows onto your hard drive ssd whatever inside of your pc now if you try doing that and selecting say this external drive it won't work so the first thing that you're going to need as far as software goes is the windows 10 media creation tool just go to windows.com i'm going to have all the links that we use in the video description so we're just going to go ahead and download the creation tool now and save file then once that's done downloading we're going to go ahead and run it just hit yes and it will get a few things ready go ahead and accept the terms and conditions and get a few things more ready you couldn't have gotten all this stuff ready the first time well it's getting windows 10 ready maybe you should go ahead and get subscribed to coil wine so when it asks you what you want to do just go ahead and click create installation media hit next and then don't worry about any of this we're just going to use recommended options hit next and then click on iso file and then hit next tell it where you want to save that iso file at so we're just going to save it in documents after about 20 minutes or so it should be done downloading so that we can install it on our external drive so while this is downloading windows 10 let's just go ahead and install the win to usb tool so go ahead and go to the easyufei.com link that'll be in the description and download the win2usbfree.exe tool so just hit save file and then up at the top go ahead and run that then it'll go through all the steps to install the when to usb free tool so after that comes up saying burn the iso file to a dvd we're just going to go ahead and hit finish then we're going to open the haslio wind usb tool and then we're going to select the image file from documents we're just going to select the windows image file hit open and then for this to be free you have to use windows 10 home so just windows 10 hit next then we're gonna select from the drop down our samsung t7 and then we're going to format it in gpt for uefi and just hit yes then we'll format the drive so that anything that's on there will be deleted so make sure that you have everything off of there that is important to you so it's going to go ahead and format it and then it will show you your uh partitions if you want to make any from here i don't really click on anything i don't mess with anything here i just go ahead and hit next once that's done installing it'll say installed successfully and it'll say please change bios to boot from the destination disk so i'm going to go ahead and show you how to boot off of that external ssd just go ahead and exit are you sure yes go ahead and restart the computer and boot into the bios real quick so once you're in the bios obviously your bios may differ from this this is the gigabyte bios but we're just going to go ahead and find the boot options priority and then on number one just hit enter and then go down to our windows boot manager in parentheses samsung ssd so just hit enter on that f10 and save from there it might restart one or two times to set up all the devices but after that it should just prompt you to set up windows like you normally would if you were just installing this as a fresh copy of windows on a normal drive so it should be pretty self-explanatory so because we skipped over the part of windows installation that has you enter in the activation key once we're in windows now you're going to go ahead and want to activate your copy of windows to keep yourself from getting that little pop-up that says this version of windows is not active now some people can ignore that forever but if you want to go ahead and activate your copy of windows just go down to the search bar and type activate and then click activation settings and then where it says change product key is where you would enter in your product key now i don't have a product key to put there for this but that is just how you do it and from here it acts like a normal computer that is just booted off of a usb ssd if we open task manager you can see under the performance tab that we have a c drive off of the samsung ssd so there's no tom blurry here this is actually running off of our usb ssd so because i know someone's going to ask in the comments how does it game here i've got cyberpunk running off of the external drive it works just fine even when driving around and loading in a whole bunch of uh texture assets it's fine i mean obviously this is a lower end computer that we're running on but it works good if we check disk usage it's not even that high it's it hangs out below 10 percent so playing games on it well having it booted off of it is nothing you should be worried about so if you like this video go ahead and leave us a like get subscribed for future random tech help we do all kinds of dumb stuff on this channel leave me a comment on what you plan on using your external drive for and like always i'll see you next time

Channel: Coil Whine

Views: 225,186

Keywords: windows 10, solid state drive, how to, boot windows from external, boot windows from external hard drive, boot windows from external ssd, steam deck external ssd, gaming from external ssd, gaming from external hard drive, steam deck, laptop, external drive, external hard drive, external ssd, samsung t7 ssd

Id: O-R7BUTYCfU

Length: 7min 24sec (444 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 05 2021