Windows 8 Consumer Preview Portable

[SmogHog]

Putting Windows 8 Consumer Preview on an external drive in a USB enclosure or on a USB flash drive is possible.

Here's what you need.
A PC running Windows 7 or Windows 8 beta;
The ISO image of Windows 8 Consumer Preview
The Windows Automated Installation Kit (AIK)
A USB storage device (at least 30GB)

Here's how I did it.


First, the USB drive needs to be prepared for the image by using Windows' diskpart command-line disk partitioning utility to re-partition and format it as a bootable NTFS drive. From an administrator-level command prompt:

• Run diskpart
• At the DISKPART> command prompt, enter LIST to find the USB device's disk number.
• Select the USB as active by entering SELECT DISK and its disk number (for example, if the USB drive is listed as disk 2, enter SELECT DISK 2 )
• Purge all the existing partitions from the USB by entering CLEAN
• Create a new partition : CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY
• Quick-format the partition as bootable NTFS: format fs=ntfs quick
• Set the partition as active: ACTIVE
• Leave diskpart by typing in EXIT

The next step is to create a new folder,name it and put the install.wim from the W8CP sources folder and the imagex.exe from the AIK Tools folder.

I'm using 64bit so I opened the Tools amd64 folder and copied all the files into the folder with install.wim

I named my folder W8CPUSB and my USB drive is D:

Now from an elevated command prompt:

type cd ..
cd \W8CPUSB

W8CPUSB>imagex.exe /apply install.wim 1 d:/

When that completes the USB drive needs to be made bootable.

At the same elevated command prompt

W8CPUSP>bcdboot.exe d:\windows /s d: /l ALL

Now you're ready to boot from the USB drive.

First you will see the W8CP Beta Fish>

Updating Registry
Preparing
Installing Devices

When this all completes you should be into Windows 8 Consumer Preview where it asks for the serial key.

The rest is the same as a regular installation.

I got most of the idea from this link but I needed to change the command line entries to get it to work.
http://arstechnica.com/business/guid...humb-drive.ars

I have it working on a 32GB flash drive and a SSD in an external box.

[Bill Gates]

the good thing about a portable w8 is its easy to smash it with a sledge hammer

[doorules]

lol. I knew your comment would be like that, hehe. I see it made a big impression on you to.

[Computurd]

man people either love it or hate it

[groberts101]

personally?.. I don't see what all the hating is about since it's practically the same thing as W7 once you tweak your way out of the metro interface. The default AHCI driver(storahci) is much more "RST like" in baseline performance compared to W7's default msahci driver.. but aside form that?.. it's still W7 in most ways that I can see.

I use it on 2 machines after it's been "dumbed down" and I really can't tell that I'm not running from W7 for most tasks. In fact.. if anything?.. it's a bit more intuitive than W7 for updates and fetching drivers for something. All they really need to do is make it user adjustable for deciding to run metro.. or not.. and most who need to buy a newer OS than XP will hardly tell the difference versus going with W7, IMO.

What I've been wondering is if we can set larger allocation sizes over the default 4096 and still maintain bootability for an OS volume. 8192 might be worth something with the right stripe size/offsets for raids(or single drives for that matter) since the page sizes seem to be trending even larger for modern SSD these days. Anyone tried that yet?

[doorules]

groberts101, now I need you to try something for me bud...

In W8, I had many shortcut icons on my regular desktop, they were from programs on my storage drive, d drive we can say.

EVERY time i would reboot or start up system in W8, go past metro screen and get to regualar desktop and hit one of those icons I just get the windows spinny thing for about 1 min. Everytime. If I hit 4 icons on desktop nothing would happen, and after W8 got it sorted all 4 would open at the same time. But there was always that delay, maddening for me.

After this initialization all was good, but my W8 does this every single time. It to me almost seems as an attempt by MS to get people back on the metro screen, but come on MS is just not that bright me thinks.

[groberts101]

hmmm?.. I probably have all my shortcuts pointing to data residing on my SSD/s so I can't speak from experience there. I'll link them to storage drives and see what happens.

EDIT: OK.. I just installed magic DVD Ripper and VegasPro 9.0 with installation files pointed to my storage array. Desktop shortcuts on my V3 open both apps near instantly in under 1 second so I can only assume that you may have driver issues or some other glitch with your install.

[doorules]

The thing is I have had it installed many times, raid and achi and it was always the same for me. And my storage drive is another M4. Weird.