My goal is to have a dedicated USB for running Windows with persistent storage, so that if it would save something to the hard drive it instead saves it to the flash drive. I do not want to dual-boot or install it.

Normally I’d be able to Google this and find my own way around. However, I don’t know what this is called. Some people seem to be calling this a bootable USB, some people seem to be calling it a live USB. And of course, none of the guides I’ve seen show them using it, shutting down and unplugging it, and then demonstrating the persistent storage on the next boot. The most I’ve gathered is that windows needs to be packaged in a special way to run like this, but it seems unclear what that means for me.

So. What is this thing called? How have you gone about making a bootable/live windows flash drive with persistent storage? Any direction would be greatly appreciated

  • tubbadu@lemmy.kde.social
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    1 year ago

    I did this a few years ago because for university I needed the spyware software “Respondus Lockdown Browser” that is specifically designed to not run in VM or wine and only supports Windows. I needed it only a very few times so a dual boot would take away disk storage I may use in better ways. If you too are obliged to stay away from a VM I’ll try to remember the tool I used, it was windows only but allowed to create windows bootable USB for free, without even a license. I partitioned my 500Gb SSD to not waste it all for Windows. Otherwise, a VM would probably serve you way better (and faster)