this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2025
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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
So, like, Ventoy with persistence?
Interesting but it seems to be only for Linux
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.)
got it thanks the SSD I tried this with in the first try was fairly old. I bought a new one now but it hadn't arrived yet I will try this again once it arrives
Good luck! I hope it works out for you.
https://www.easyuefi.com/wintousb/
Thanks I know there is wintousb software but it is also Windows specific I don't have Windows around to use it
Wine for wintousb or make a vhd for Ventoy.
Thanks yes trying wine or winboat is my last option
Since you've edited to clarify, you want WinToUSB.
None of these are what he's asking about. He wants windows installed on a flash drive, so he can boot to it and be in the OS, with windows seeing the flash drive as C:
So they want the second one I mentioned, WinToUSB.
Edit: Though to be clear you can do this with Ventoy too, just make a vhd.
Flash drive performance gonna be abysmal. If you want to try it on day I suggest a dedicated external SSD connected via USB 3 atleast
You sure WintoUSB is not Windows specific software?
It runs under wine, but check versions at the winehq db for what to grab.
Ok will check wine db