If you've ever wanted to actually
install Windows onto a USB drive, whether a thumb drive or an external SSD, that's
what this video is all about, you might not have known you could actually do that. And all
you're gonna need are three different things. First is a free tool called Rufus, which
is made for creating bootable USB drives. You're also gonna need a Windows 10 or Windows
11 ISO, and also of course a USB drive, the faster the better. Now while you can
install this to a regular small USB thumb drive, it's probably gonna be a lot slower.
Though again, it will still work. The best option would be a external SSD, like
one of these made by Samsung or Crucial. These are gonna be a lot faster, closer
to internal SSD speeds. Either way though, you're definitely gonna want to use something
that's USB 3.0 at least. So let's get into these steps and it's really not too hard to follow.
So first of all, you're gonna have to go and download Rufus. So you can go to Rufus.ie,
and I'll put the links in the description, and scroll down to the download section and
just click and download the portable version. That way you won't have to install it, you just
run the exe and it runs the program. Now we're gonna need a Windows installation ISO. So you
can Google Windows 11 ISO or Windows 10 ISO, depending on which one you want. And just
go to whichever is like the top result. Make sure it's Microsoft.com, but I'll
also put the links in the description. That's just in case they change
it at some point. For Windows 11, scroll down to the section that at the moment
is called "Download Windows 11 Disc Image" and select the download. Though there is only one
option here right now, and then click download, but that doesn't actually start the download.
You then have to select your language and then hit confirm, and then you'll see a
button appear for 64 bit download and click that, and that will actually start the download,
and just let that finish. For Windows 10 the way to get the ISO is a bit different. So
there's no direct ISO download on this page, at least right now. You have to use the Windows
installation media tool to download it instead. So under "Create Windows 10 Installation Media"
click download now and it should start right away. So just run that, and when you get
to this menu, select "create installation media for another PC" and click next. Here
you can just keep the default options unless maybe you want to change your language.
And then on this one, select "ISO File" and hit next, and choose where to
download it. After you hit save, it will download the ISO wherever you
put it. So now here is how to actually create the USB. And this is gonna
be the same process at this point, whether you downloaded Windows 11 or Windows 10.
So run Rufus from wherever you downloaded it, and you'll see this window. Now don't get
too overwhelmed, you don't have to change too much. So for the boot selection, it
should already be set to disc or ISO image, if it's not just select that. And then
click "Select" next to that and navigate to wherever you saved the ISO, and choose
that. And after you do, it you now show that in the box. Next at the top, you can select
which USB drive you want to install it to. Though keep in mind, if you are using
a bigger full size external SSD, not just a little thumbs stick, you might
notice it doesn't actually show up as an option in the dropdown here. For that, you need
to hit "Show advanced drive properties" for the dropdown and click "List USB hard drives".
And then it should appear like it does here. Then just make absolutely sure that you are
picking the correct one because it will wipe whatever drive you select. Under Image Option,
change that dropdown to say "Windows To Go". And the rest of the options you can keep
the same, unless maybe you want to change the name of the drive label, you can do that
too here if you want. After all that click Start and choose which version of Windows you
want to install. If you're using this as like a rescue disc or something, and you're not gonna
be activating it, you may as well just choose Pro. This next window will ask you some configuration
questions. For me by default, it only checked, "Prevent Windows To Go from accessing
internal disks." But if you are using this as a rescue disc, I would uncheck this,
so you can actually work on the computer that it's running on. And then I would check all
the other boxes. Disabled data collection, may as well. Create a local account
with the same name as the current one, so you don't have to create a login or login with
a Microsoft account. And also Set up regional options, same as the current one, just to save you
some steps. Then you click okay and wait a second, and it will warn you one last time that the
drive will be wiped, so be sure you picked the right one. And after you confirm, it will
go and do its thing. How long this takes will heavily depend on the speed of your USB drive. On
this one, the Crucial SSD which is really fast, it only took about five minutes. Whereas
on my other Samsung USB thumb drive, which is actually a pretty decent one,
it took like over an hour if I remember, so definitely a huge difference. Either way,
once it's done, it's not gonna show any kind of success message, it'll just say ready. And
then, you know it's done and you can close Rufus. And now if we go into the drive, you can see
that it has the same file structure as a typical Windows C drive. It's got Program Files, Users,
Windows folder. And if you look at the partitions, there is actually another hidden
partition for booting and stuff, but that's not gonna show up in Explorer. Now
let's get to actually booting off this drive. Now, one thing to note is that to
run off this USB drive Windows, you're gonna have to disable something called
Secure Boot, and that's just a limitation of Windows To Go. Now you can re-enable secure
boot after you're done booting off the drive, but you will have to have it disabled
for it to work. Before you do though, be aware that if you have BitLocker on your
computer, or encryption for your device, then secure boot, disabling that, will likely
trigger the BitLocker to require you to input your recovery key again, because it changes some of the
encryption stuff. So just make sure you have that recovery key for BitLocker backed up, which you
should anyway. Like otherwise what are you doing? But just make sure triple check that you do.
And I believe also if you have a Microsoft account you're logging into, BitLocker
might have given you an option to back up your key to your account, so maybe
that's an option to look into. Anyway, once you ensure that you have any
encryption recovery keys backed up, you can actually go into the BIOS and look for
where it asks you to disable secure boot. This is gonna vary depending on your computer, so
you're just gonna have to look up how you do it. And also again like I said, after
you're done booting up into the drive, or testing it out, whatever, you probably
will want to re-enable secure boot, it is a pretty good security feature. So
once that is all set up, you can actually go and boot into the drive. Though again,
you're probably gonna have to know how to select an alternate boot device on your
computer. That also is going to vary, and you're gonna have to look it up.
Although usually in the bios itself, that you were just in, there's somewhere usually
an option to boot from it, from there. Anyway, once you're booting on to that drive, it should
just take a while, it'll say getting things ready, and depending again on how fast your drive
is, this is gonna take anywhere from just a few minutes to like 15+ minutes when I
was doing it off the small thumb drive. And once you get in, it'll take you to the
first time setup, just as if you had done a fresh install of Windows, because you basically
did. And here you can just select that you don't have an internet connection, even if you
do. Just so it doesn't make you log into a Microsoft account. Because remember it should have
automatically created a local account for you. So once you select accept limited installation,
you can see the account that Rufus created for you, and you can just log into that. Once you're
into Windows, you'll see that everything is pretty much standard. There's nothing really special
to show you. We can look in the C drive just as an example, and you can see that it is set to
that SSD, with the same structure we saw before, and the internal drive is set to the D drive. So
that's obviously not booting off of that. So this should be a persistent installation of Windows, so
if you make any changes in it or anything, they'll stay there, it's not like a live CD that resets.
Now there are some limitations to Windows To Go, probably the most notable one is that
apparently it doesn't allow you to upgrade to new versions of Windows. I don't
know if this applies to security updates, but definitely for build updates,
supposedly. It just won't allow you to make any major upgrades. So if you did
want to upgrade to like a new yearly update, you probably would need to do a fresh
install again with Rufus using the latest ISO. And if you are gonna do that, just be
sure that you take off any files or anything, because it's gonna wipe it again.
There are some other differences too, here's a list on the Microsoft article
about Windows To Go. Where you can you just read off the screen here, what the
differences are, if you're interested. So that's how you do it, pretty
straightforward. The only tricky part was maybe that secure boot part, but you
can decide for yourself whether it's worth the hassle for that. If you guys enjoyed this video,
definitely give a thumbs up for the algorithm, and also maybe check out the rest
of my channel, consider subscribing. If you do, also be sure to click the
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days if you subscribe to a channel, YouTube still might not show you the videos,
so if you want considered doing that too. If you want to keep watching, the next video I'd
recommend it's pretty related. It's a video I made a while ago talking about how to make
the ultimate USB bootable drive using a software called Ventoy, which basically lets you just
put a whole bunch of ISOs onto one USB drive, and then boot from any one you want. So
it's like making one super bootable drive, it's really cool. So I'll
put that link right there, you can click on. And let me know
what you think down the comments too. So thanks so much for watching
and I'll see you in the next one.
