Windows – Install windows on USB from existing windows installation

bootuefiusbwindowswindows 7

I have old Windows 7 laptop with producent-changed Windows 7 image (very small + touchable screen support) but with very small disc. After multiple attemps I failed to make clear installation of windows 7 with many drivers variations. What I want to achieve: move/copy/create exisiting Windows 7 image and install it on usb-pendrive using WinToUSB or something like that, so it can be plug in and run

Long story short I try 2 new approaches:

  1. create backup iso and install it on pendrive
  2. copy (if it is possible) it from booting partition and then install it on USB stick

So that I have two questions

  1. Is option one even possible – I'm not sure if backup image of windows 7 done via build in applications can be installed later somewhere else
  2. How to copy image fromm bootable partition with or without usage of uefi console

Thank you!

Best Answer

To make a clone of the existing disk to another disk or USB drive you need to use external software like Acronis True Image or AOMEI Backupper. It can clone your drive in byte mode which means that it will copy disk data as is byte by byte. This will ensure that the data and boot structure (as well as boot partition) remain operatable.

Depending on the version and USB disk type it may or may nor recognize it. After data is cloned you need to configure BIOS to boot from USB device accordingly.

Official guide: Acronis True Image: how to clone a disk. Check the section "Cloning from Acronis Bootable Media".

What's important that you need to use bootable version of Acronis to do this (DOS/Linux version) running from bootable USB stick. You can download it for free separately and it's also included into Bootable Live CD/DVD/USB Windows PE disks that are very popular among admins when testing/fixing a non-bootable computer. A good comparison of Live disks is available here. I prefer to use Hiren’s BootCD PE x64 or Sergei Strelec WinPE.

Note: You can't clone the disk from the software installed on the same drive.

Creating the partition on the target USB device and manual copy-paste of data will not also work.

Creation of ISO file from the existing disk partition will not also work for you. This process is called sysprep and is used by hardware vendors to create a brand image by deleting of all user settings and drivers from the source machine. This is not what you want to archive.

Another option that is used by IT Pro is capture of the disk to wim image and apply of the WIM image. This is quite complicated activity which consists of 3 steps:

  1. Boot from Live CD/DVD/USB or WinPE
  2. Capture a source partition(s) to WIM image by one of the utilities: dism, GImageX and some other free tools. Microsoft provides a full guide how to do this with dism but it's very complicated process and it can't be explained in scope of this answer. Please refer to the documentation.
  3. Apply WIM image to the target disk. In case of USB stick you need to have it partitioned first and make it bootable.
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