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

[Giles Orr]

On 12 April 2015 at 00:46, D. Hugh Redelmeier <hugh at mimosa.com> wrote:
> 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.

It's been a long time since I mucked with this (Windows 7, but several
years ago), but my experience agrees with yours: Windows is very
fragile about being moved.  I'd suggest that if you want to attempt to
boot Windows from an external media that you also make a pristine
image of the original HD and set that aside.  I suspect that the
second you boot the external version of Windows, it will write
breaking changes to itself and never be usable again.  I think the
only way you're going to successfully boot Windows on it again is to
wipe Linux from the original drive, and re-image it from your original
clean copy.  I may be being overly pessimistic, but I've had very poor
luck working with Windows on anything that wasn't its own original
hardware after its been installed.  Best of luck.

-- 
Giles
http://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr at gmail.com