On 12 April 2015 at 00:46, D. Hugh Redelmeier <hugh@mimosa.com> 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?
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.)
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.
It's been a long time since I mucked with this (Windows 7, but several years ago), but my experience agrees with yours: Windows is very fragile about being moved. I'd suggest that if you want to attempt to boot Windows from an external media that you also make a pristine image of the original HD and set that aside. I suspect that the second you boot the external version of Windows, it will write breaking changes to itself and never be usable again. I think the only way you're going to successfully boot Windows on it again is to wipe Linux from the original drive, and re-image it from your original clean copy. I may be being overly pessimistic, but I've had very poor luck working with Windows on anything that wasn't its own original hardware after its been installed. Best of luck. -- Giles http://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr@gmail.com