Search the Community

I've been intrigued by Windows To Go feature of Windows 8 (found in the Enterprise Edition) but haven't been able to find an affordable and biggable USB flash drive that met the hardware requirements. That is until today. I purchased a 64GB Sandisk Extreme USB 3.0 UFD last week for work with the intent of turning it into a bootable WinPE drive with Ghost so I could quickly image machines that had no network access or slow access to my normal Ghost Server. Well I was pretty unhappy when the Makewinpemedia script in the Windows 8 Application Deployment Kit could not format the drive. Why? It is coded to use FAT32, which in Windows Vista and up has an arbitrary limit of only being able to format partitions up to 32GB. I'm sure I could tweak the script but I'm lazy. Anyways, as I was examining the new UFD's properties with diskpart I noticed the drive was listed as having a partition of type=partition rather than type=removable. As soon as I saw that I realized I had a Win-2-Go compatible drive. I ran the Win-2-Go wizard and rebooted the drive on another computer. Man, was it fast. It booted in about 15 seconds from disk selection to lock screen. And you know what? It was fast. Almost as fast as an SSD courtesy of the USB 3.0 interface. And it was portable. I booted it on two different hardware platforms (both Core i5 but with different Intel chipsets.) I'm looking forward to Windows 8.1 and making another Win-2-Go disk.