On Sun, Apr 12, 2015 at 12:46:37AM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
I bought a cute little box (a weakness of mine): an HP Stream Mini. It comes with Win8.1 with Bing x64 on its "HDD", a 32G M.2 SSD. Note that it is x64: not one of these Atoms with a crippled 32-bit UEFI.
Fedora 21 runs fine off a live USB stick.
The SSD is a fine size for Linux, but not a fine size for Win8.1 + Linux. So I intend to evict Windows from the SSD. But I feel that I need to keep Win8.1 bootable - I paid for it (a lame reason) - I will likely need Win8.1 to do firmware updates - it might be worth playing with for some purposes
I'd like to migrate Win8.1 to a USB3 device. I just bought a 64G usb stick which might be perfect ($19.99 at NCIX this weekend). Or more likely, a 2.5" external HDD.
Does anyone know how to migrate Windows?
To another SATA disk is no big deal. To USB is a totally different story. Not even sure if you can. A quick search confirms that installing TO usb/firewire is NOT supported (at least in Windows 7). There are ways around it, but don't expect it to always work. See http://www.intowindows.com/how-to-install-windows-7-to-usb-external-hard-dri... for example.
Googling finds lots of moderately crappy postings about how to move Windows to an SSD but I cannot tell if they assume that some vital essence is left on the original drive. (I actually wish to move the opposite way; that ought not to be a problem.)
Moving to an SSD is just another SATA drive. Nothing complex about that. It is still just an internal SATA drive.
I've found Windows quite fragile, possibly due to piracy prevention things. It also seems to want to own booting and on UEFI / Secure Boot systems this gets downright magical (i.e. I don't understand it)
All seem to take proprietary non-Microsoft software -- one fears a bait-and-switch. (I bet some of the bootable ones are based on Linux.)
I can experiment, but I thought I'd ask here first.
I think what you want to do simply isn't supported in windows. I think you are out of luck. -- Len Sorensen