Any flashdrives suitable for installing and using windows from?
- Thread starter PiKe
- Start date
Hey guys,
When I used to work at the local computer store, I made the mistake of cloning a hard drive to another one whilst leaving my memory stick in the back. I chose the wrong one, and it cloned it to my memory stick. I never tried it, as I was more interested in getting my data back
But, if your motherboard can boot from a USB device, which so many can these days, then it would work. Obviously you would need a fast memory stick, because if you use a cheap one with a R/W speed of 20MB/s, it will be a very slow system.
Cheers, Chris.
When I used to work at the local computer store, I made the mistake of cloning a hard drive to another one whilst leaving my memory stick in the back. I chose the wrong one, and it cloned it to my memory stick. I never tried it, as I was more interested in getting my data back
But, if your motherboard can boot from a USB device, which so many can these days, then it would work. Obviously you would need a fast memory stick, because if you use a cheap one with a R/W speed of 20MB/s, it will be a very slow system.
Cheers, Chris.
Windows XP will happily install to a usb stick. It will then refuse to boot from it. Its a bit of a mission. http://www.ngine.de/article/id/8 but it works excellently. I did it with a standard pny 4gb and it was fine.
Not exactly beautiful to work with, but plays films and so forth happily, with no sound of hard drives spinning.
The faster the drive the better, clearly. And capacity is an issue. Be aware that XP installed onto an ocz solid series wipes the floor with xp on a usb stick, and if you want more than 8gb or so of capacity it'll be comparable in price.
Not exactly beautiful to work with, but plays films and so forth happily, with no sound of hard drives spinning.
The faster the drive the better, clearly. And capacity is an issue. Be aware that XP installed onto an ocz solid series wipes the floor with xp on a usb stick, and if you want more than 8gb or so of capacity it'll be comparable in price.
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Are you thinking of actually using a Flash Disk to use as a drive to opperate windows from or to copy the instal cd from and install from windows to another drive? I've never used windows from a flash drive, i would never dream of it and i've never had any reason to in complete honesty but as far as installing windows from flash goes.
i've read a few sites on this topic which seem to all say the same thing and that is the OCZ ATV Flash drive seems to be the fastest drive (30mb Read/25 write or there about going off my memory) to copy windows vista too and install windows from, i can't afford one yet but at the end of the month, when i've sold all of my teeth to the toothfairy and put a kidney on ebay
it'll be the 2nd thing that i get, you won't need more than 4GB to install either windows xp or vista from.
I did try installing vista from an 8GB Kingston data traveller but it was that slow that i descided, in the end, to ditch the installation and go back to installing from disk. Also it seems that both windows xp and vista will both install from flash drive but vista is by far the easiest of the two to use, windows xp requires some messing around with where as you can use diskpart through dos to prep the flash drive and then just simply copy the contents of the vista install cd over to the flash drive, go to the bios upon reset to select boot from usb and job done but i can't remember where i saw the article about it now, i'll have a look and post a link to the tut that i used and post it here later if that's what you need to know.
i've read a few sites on this topic which seem to all say the same thing and that is the OCZ ATV Flash drive seems to be the fastest drive (30mb Read/25 write or there about going off my memory) to copy windows vista too and install windows from, i can't afford one yet but at the end of the month, when i've sold all of my teeth to the toothfairy and put a kidney on ebay
it'll be the 2nd thing that i get, you won't need more than 4GB to install either windows xp or vista from. I did try installing vista from an 8GB Kingston data traveller but it was that slow that i descided, in the end, to ditch the installation and go back to installing from disk. Also it seems that both windows xp and vista will both install from flash drive but vista is by far the easiest of the two to use, windows xp requires some messing around with where as you can use diskpart through dos to prep the flash drive and then just simply copy the contents of the vista install cd over to the flash drive, go to the bios upon reset to select boot from usb and job done but i can't remember where i saw the article about it now, i'll have a look and post a link to the tut that i used and post it here later if that's what you need to know.
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