Windows 8: How to create a Windows To Go USB drive

Microsoft released a new feature called “Windows To Go” with Windows 8. With this feature it is possible to boot your Windows 8 from a USB drive on any PC. In this post I show you how you can do this.

Requirements

• UBS drive with 16GB free Space
• A PC running Windows 8
• The Windows 8 Consumer Preview ISO

Step-by-Step

First let me show you my setup to begin with.

I have my System Drive (C:), the USB drive I want to use (E:) and the Windows 8 ISO mounted (F:)

1. Run diskpart
   
2. With “list disk” you can list all your disk
   
3. Now select your usb drive (select disk 1) and clean it. After that you can create a new partition and format that and close diskpart.

   select disk 1
   clean
   create partition primary
   format fs=ntfs quick
   active
   assign letter=e
   exit

   

4. Now in my case the ISO is mounted as drive F:. Now with dism I can apply the Windows Image to my USB drive (E:)

   dism /apply-image /imagefile=f:\sources\install.wim /index:1 /applydir:e:\

   

5. Now you have to make this drive bootable

   bcdboot e:\windows /s e: /f ALL

6. now you are done. You can now boot your USB drive. The first boot will take some time to setup.

If you want to know more about Windows To Go I recommend you the Microsoft session from the BUILD conference.