Portable WES7 on SD card

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I bought a pair of SanDisk 4GB SDHC cards in order to try out a portable WES7 installation.

Sadly neither of my portable machines (an Acer Aspire 7520 (AMD64AthlonX2) and a Packard Bell dot se (Intel Atom 450)) support booting from the SD Card reader, but I have a USB card reader adapter which enables inserted SD cards to be booted from.

On the Acer, I reformatted one of the cards to NTFS, single primary partition (3.68GB), and with boot order set to 1.CD/DVD, 2.USB, 3.HDD - booted from the WES7 32-bit IBW DVD, and proceeded to build the OS for the SD.

The system was basically a thin-PC type build with a few extras like .net, but with bootable USB support and SD booting support and the HORM write filter because I don't fully understand these features and want to get to play with them.

The build took an age compared to either installing a thin client build to a HD partition or a VM, but eventually it all completed and activated happily with http://forums.mydigitallife.info/thr...tandard-7-keys. At first everything was rather slow, but I think that may have been the usual first run syndrome, and indexing the new system.

About 3GBfor the full install (I'll attach the DISM /online /get-features output list for anybody interested.Attachment 10826 There's probably a load of unnecessary stuff in there. Any suggestions would be welcome.

It speeded up a little but was still sluggish.

I shut down again, and transferred the USB card reader to the Packard Bell, and it booted up without complaint!

System Properties report that the product is still activated, so the change of hardware platform makes no difference. I'd have to install another set of drivers to make it fully functional.

Now of course I shall be trying to boot every conceivable system from it. It's a great feeling to know I have an SD card with a Windows 7 installation that I can run on different hardware.

Indeed, having it boot from a memory card is pretty nice :)
I'm also building an OS image I can boot anywhere from USB, and it works well. Boots on all of the systems I've tested it on so far, including older machines like Athlon XP or Pentium 3 with 512 MB RAM and USB 1.1.

It's a good idea to use the write filters (EWF or FBWF) on memory cards or flash drives. These will prevent writes to the protected partitions using an overlay that stores writes temporarily in RAM instead, which will be discarded on reboot. This will improve performance, as only disk reads will need to be performed on the drive, and also reduces memory wear. The write filters also allow the write overlay to be committed to disk or disabled entirely, if you made any changes that you would like persisted (using the write filter management tools from WEDU makes this much easier). Using FBWF you can selectively exclude files or directories from write protection, and Registry Filter allows you to configure registry paths that should be persisted on a protected OS partition.

On my USB setup I have one 2GB partition for the OS, and another one for file storage and portable applications, with the OS partition protected by EWF. This way you can use the storage partition for user or application data that should be persisted, and also run the portable apps on other machines if you don't want to boot from USB.

Some of the issues when trying to boot from USB:
Older BIOSes and VMs won't boot from USB at all (Workaround: http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html).
Not every BIOS will boot from USB devices that have the "Removable Media Bit" (RMB) set, which is the case on most USB sticks (though it can be changed on some devices).
Windows will not let you partition a device with RMB, and if it does contain multiple partitions, it will only allow access to the first one (Workarounds: "Hitachi Microdrive" filter driver, DiskMod).

For testing and setting up the OS image I recommend using a USB hard drive, since performance will be much better, and you won't waste any write cycles on the flash drive. When you're done setting it up you can just copy the OS partition to the flash drive or storage card.

Quote:
Originally Posted by fafhrd
I bought a pair of SanDisk 4GB SDHC cards in order to try out a portable WES7 installation.

Sadly neither of my portable machines (an Acer Aspire 7520 (AMD64AthlonX2) and a Packard Bell dot se (Intel Atom 450)) support booting from the SD Card reader, but I have a USB card reader adapter which enables inserted SD cards to be booted from.

On the Acer, I reformatted one of the cards to NTFS, single primary partition (3.68GB), and with boot order set to 1.CD/DVD, 2.USB, 3.HDD - booted from the WES7 32-bit IBW DVD, and proceeded to build the OS for the SD.

The system was basically a thin-PC type build with a few extras like .net, but with bootable USB support and SD booting support and the HORM write filter because I don't fully understand these features and want to get to play with them.

The build took an age compared to either installing a thin client build to a HD partition or a VM, but eventually it all completed and activated happily with http://forums.mydigitallife.info/thr...tandard-7-keys. At first everything was rather slow, but I think that may have been the usual first run syndrome, and indexing the new system.

About 3GBfor the full install (I'll attach the DISM /online /get-features output list for anybody interested.Attachment 10826 There's probably a load of unnecessary stuff in there. Any suggestions would be welcome.

It speeded up a little but was still sluggish.

I shut down again, and transferred the USB card reader to the Packard Bell, and it booted up without complaint!

System Properties report that the product is still activated, so the change of hardware platform makes no difference. I'd have to install another set of drivers to make it fully functional.

Now of course I shall be trying to boot every conceivable system from it. It's a great feeling to know I have an SD card with a Windows 7 installation that I can run on different hardware.
So the speed eventually evens out? I did a USB HDD install and it ran a bit too laggy for me to use as a main OS, but I was just testing it out.

Hi,

I' trying to install WES7 on a USB key or an external hard drive but the install process can't find any drive even if the bios of the laptop can detect the usb drives.
If you please can guide me.

Read and learn great advise from Sebus that I already followed but with no luck.

Thanks!

The following shows how to create an ntfs active primary partition on a usb disk with a temporary volume drive letter of u: (for usb), and a label of usbwes assuming then is not a drive already with that assigned letter. We will then apply a new windows embedded WIM image to the partition.

Make sure your USB storage device is plugged in, and that your BIOS can recognize USB devices as bootable.

If you boot from the WES7 IBW DVD, you get an interface to the Windows preinstallation environment (WinPE) and there are several options:

Build an Image

Deploy an Answer File or WIM

Launch WinPE Command Prompt (this loads networking services)

and you can use the F10 key to call up a new command console (this does not load networking)

Tap L on your keyboard to launch wpeinit.exe and you will have a command prompt

Code:
X:\Sources>
(X: is the ramdisk that WinPE creates to run itself from)

type

Code:
diskpart
At the DISKPART> prompt, type

Code:
list disk
You should be able to see all storage disks on your system, except the DVD in use and the ramdisk that WinPE uses.

If you have an 8GB USB drive, it would show up as something like:

Code:
Disk 2 Online 7680 MB 7680 MB
select the disk by typing

Code:
sel disk 2
Code:
"Disk 2 is now the selected disk."
should appear

If you are sure that this disk is the one that you want to work with, select its disk number, otherwise, stop here and type exit.

If all is ok, type the following commands

Code:
clean
Code:
create partition primary
Code:
sel part 1
Code:
assign letter=u
Code:
active
Code:
format fs=ntfs label="usbwes" quick
Code:
exit
you have now left diskpart and your USB device is prepped.

If you have created your image file in the IBW, and saved it as install.wim on a shared network drive on a computer called \\mycomputer in a folder named \images, for instance:

\\mycomputer\images\install.wim

You do this by typing

Code:
net use n: \\mycomputer\images /user <username>
and then your password for <username>

you can apply it using imagex as follows, still from the WinPE interface

Code:
imagex /apply n:\install.wim 1 u:
then make it bootable by typing:

Code:
bcdboot u:\windows /s u:
It seems quicker that way than selecting "Deploy Answer File or WIM".

If you have not yet created your image you can do it directly from the Image builder wizard, by going back to the WinPE Embedded start screen and selecting B to build an image, which you can do directly on drive u:, selecting language and region and whether you want other drivers etc., added to the image. The IBW should reformat the drive, and make it bootable and ready for a first run.

(The imagex commandline is exactly the same operation for applying Windows 8 to a usb drive in a WindowsToGo setup.)

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