Windows on a USB key

Tomshardware recently touched on how important it can be to have a backup of your OS aswell as data, even on a good spec reinstalling the OS plus all your apps/drivers can be time consuming…

With USB media constantly increasing in size and becoming cheaper what better way to backup your OS to a portable, bootable USB flash drive.

All that’s needed is a bootable USB Flash drive with at least 256 MB of storage capacity and a Windows Setup CD. Using the program Bart PE Builder (Freeware), you can install Windows XP on the flash drive, along with other software as needed (and as available space permits).

One point to note here is that your bios does need to support USB booting:

Q: Can BartPE boot from USB flash drives (UFD)?
A: Maybe. Does your BIOS supports booting from UFD as if it were a harddisk? The Windows XP FAT bootsector code does not behave correctly when booting from UFD. Bart already “fixed” the FAT bootsector code. But booting from UFD is not stable at the moment. It is very dependent on what exact hardware is used. Some bioses cannot be set to the correct emulation and other systems hang or abort when the windows USB drivers are loaded. Tricky stuff, maybe better support in future…

TomsHardware has a great walkthrough of setting this up, from formatting the USB drive and making it bootable and adding win XP sp2 + updates through to adding Nero and Firefox.

Source & Image (yes of course it’s photoshopped)- TomsHardWare

Listen to this article +del.icio.us