[GTALUG] moving Win8.1 with Bing out of the way

D. Hugh Redelmeier hugh at mimosa.com
Sun Apr 12 04:46:37 UTC 2015


I bought a cute little box (a weakness of mine): an HP Stream Mini.
It comes with Win8.1 with Bing x64 on its "HDD", a 32G M.2 SSD.  Note
that it is x64: not one of these Atoms with a crippled 32-bit UEFI.

Fedora 21 runs fine off a live USB stick.

The SSD is a fine size for Linux, but not a fine size for Win8.1 + Linux.  
So I intend to evict Windows from the SSD.  But I feel that I need to keep 
Win8.1 bootable
- I paid for it (a lame reason)
- I will likely need Win8.1 to do firmware updates
- it might be worth playing with for some purposes

I'd like to migrate Win8.1 to a USB3 device.  I just bought a 64G usb 
stick which might be perfect ($19.99 at NCIX this weekend).  Or more 
likely, a 2.5" external HDD.

Does anyone know how to migrate Windows?

Googling finds lots of moderately crappy postings about how to move
Windows to an SSD but I cannot tell if they assume that some vital
essence is left on the original drive.  (I actually wish to move the
opposite way; that ought not to be a problem.)

I've found Windows quite fragile, possibly due to piracy prevention
things.  It also seems to want to own booting and on UEFI / Secure
Boot systems this gets downright magical (i.e.  I don't understand it)

All seem to take proprietary non-Microsoft software -- one fears a
bait-and-switch.  (I bet some of the bootable ones are based on
Linux.)

I can experiment, but I thought I'd ask here first.


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