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I'm a bit confused by the question.
Do you want to write the installation files to a USB drive? There's dd, KDE ISO Image Writer, Balena Etcher, Gnome MultiWriter, etc.
Do you want to boot a full windows installation off a thumb drive? You would want to look at Ventoy or WinToUSB.
Would you want to run windows at the same time in a VM? Thats essentially what I do when I need to run a specialty windows application.
No I don't want to make a bootable USB already have a Ventoy USB drive for that. in Windows With Rufus or win to USB you can install an Windows iso as "Windows To Go" to a external drive (can be a thumb drive or better an SSD) and then boot from that drive and have functioning Windows installation on it which is also kinda portable too
Edit: typo
You don't need to do anything special. Take an NVMe or SSD and put it internally in some PC—ideally the same computer you want to use it on, for driver reasons—then install Windows on it. (Windows won't let you install to a USB device, so you have to put the drive internally in the PC.) Then take it back out, put it in an external enclosure, plug it into USB and it boots right up. (Well, as long as you know how to choose a boot device at startup or make USB a higher priority than your internal drive.)
I just did that on my laptop by taking out the Windows NVMe, putting in a new one for Linux, and then sticking the Windows NVMe in an enclosure.
Obviously, this can't work on a thumb drive, but it's not terribly inconvenient to carry around an enclosure and a cable.
(An LLM told me I should change some registry settings to make loading the USB drivers occur earlier during boot, but that doesn't make much sense. How could it boot enough to load the Registry in order to know to load the USB drivers earlier? It's already booting. But if you try this and have any troubles, I can probably figure out what Registry settings I changed. I've also done this with an M.2 SSD from one PC and booted it from a USB enclosure on a different PC, and I definitely made no registry changes then.)
Windows To Go was discontinued back in 2019 so it's not really something that has been maintained or updated for a long time
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_To_Go#Discontinuation
Apps like Rufus (Windows only) are still able to create that sort of boot USB but it's sort of a non supported feature, wouldn't be surprised if it just stops working one day.
On Linux Ventoy is often used for this - it does have a persistence plugin but not for Windows https://www.ventoy.net/en/plugin_persistence.html
I haven't tested this idea, but maybe you can run a Windows VM within Linux, enable USB in it, download Rufus in it, then you can create your non-official Windows To Go boot disk that way? Could be something to try if you never find another solution.
Thanks Yes this is what I was thinking to try next if I run out of options
Why not just run Windows in a VM?
Unfortunately not everything works in a VM
It should.
Hell I have hardware dongles I have to deal with that work fine in a VM.
Are you sure you can't go the easier route with a VM? Running off USB will be slow and unpleasant, especially with windows.
What's the VM issue?
In my case it’s been hardware acceleration. Sure I can make the adobe suite “run” but it’s not really usable at a professional level without hardware accel.
Single GPU or dual GPU laptop?
Have you looked at libvf.io?
virtio-gpu (if you look to the more recent work) has made big strides, but I also wouldn't consider it "ready".
Single gpu on my desktop. AMD 7900xt. I haven’t looked at either of those. I’ll give them a browse!
Take a look, and consider one more option (I have this setup in one of my workstations).
A second GPU. Older is fine, I have an older quadro 2000 in one machine thats great for cad, when I load up my VM for AutoCAD architecture, thats the GPU its using.
I have a few others with quadro 620s in them, the Intel iGPU is accessed shared by being an lxc, the quadros I pass through to the VMs. Some need very different configs, so I only power up the VM when I need it, so they can all use the same passed through GPU.
Ohh I see. You just dedicate another gpu to the VM? That sounds cool. I do have an extra.
Have you ever tried running Solidworks or Fusion 360 or Ansys or other Autodesk software in a vm? Painful is all I can say
Yes.
On my virt host, which I pass the GPU to. I remote into it from my laptop.
I have a client running both Solidworks and Fusion 360 in VMWare Workstation with GPU pass-thru enabled, it's pretty straightforward to setup and the end-users were pleased with it's performance. If you have USB license keys those usually work as well, just setup the USB device pass-thru.
Ventoy supports any iso, including Windows
Yes it does and it's great but it does not support setting up "Windows to Go"
Sorry to almost have misled you
You could just pull your drives, install a nvme and install windows. Then pull that drive and put it in an enclosure. Then choose that drive when booting. Idk if that works on modern windows but the install then pulling the drive used to work on 7-
At first I thought about this too. Didn't work with either Windows 10 or 11 iso. It didn't boot after I took it out and put in the enclosure
Oh, that's weird. I just suggested the same thing up above with a bunch of extra explanation. I've done this exact thing twice. In that comment I talk about changing some registry settings, but like I said in the comment, I didn't think that actually helped. So I dunno. This was with Windows 10 both times, and both USB devices boot on a laptop.
I don't know about windows to go. But rufus? Isn't it just writing images to usb drives? Sounds like you're looking for the dd command. You can write images with
dd if=/path/to/my/image of=/dev/[insert device here] status=progress
I don't think you need to involve Linux at all if you boot the official windows installer. I would just install the SSD as the only drive internally and install to it, then put it back in its enclosure.
This is probably an inefficient solution, but I just did this the other day using dockur/windows as a VM and passing through the drive. It's really easy if you have docker experience.
Once the VM has installed Windows to the drive you can just boot from it as normal (whatever the VM does to Windows to make it wanna boot in a VM let's it boot off the USB)
Here's a link the docs for this: docker/windows
Let me know if you have any questions :)
Thanks I'll look into it
I used Rufus to make Linus boot USBs for AGES
Just in case and I know this may sound like a duh type question and I apologize if you have already exhausted it. But you have tried installing it with wine and play on linux?
wine won't cut it for CAD software unfortunately
sorry. I figured you had tried but mentioned just in case. I was surprised when using playonlinux. I thought it would just run executables but it doing like a pho install was neat. I don't use cad software though.
I'm sure windows activation will complain, but you should be able to dd your windows partition (or disk) over to the external disk, set up a bootloader (windows can do this, but something like grub or syslinux I know would work to hand off to the windows bootloader)
I don't know anything about bitlocker stuff, probably needs to be decrypted before this can work.
That's what I would try, even though it's not wrapped up in a single tool.
I have never used Bitlocker before and I'll keep it off. Also yes some else mentioned I can just use dd I'll look into it thanks
Boot to WinPE and use Rufus to create one maybe? Not sure if WTG still works though.
I personally never used WTG. If you're planning to use this across multiple machines/hw configs, I don't think the normal windows can handle it as you'd have to install the correct drivers every time. I recall there being some hardware profile thing at bootup but not so sure. (that was XP)