{"id":39793,"date":"2004-04-15T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2004-04-15T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2004\/04\/15\/why-cant-i-install-windows-on-my-usb-drive\/"},"modified":"2004-04-15T07:00:00","modified_gmt":"2004-04-15T07:00:00","slug":"why-cant-i-install-windows-on-my-usb-drive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20040415-00\/?p=39793","title":{"rendered":"Why can&#039;t I install Windows on my USB drive?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A collection of limitations (both hardware and software)  currently prevent Windows from booting and running off a USB drive.  Some of them are described in  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/whdc\/hwdev\/bus\/usb\/usb-boot.mspx\">  this whitepaper from WinHEC 2003<\/a>.  Another reason not mentioned in this paper is that during any hot-plug  operation, the USB bus is completely reinitialized.  Windows really doesn&#8217;t like it when it loses access to its boot device.  Imagine, you plug in a USB camera, the USB bus reinitializes, Windows  loses access to the boot drive, and <em>oops<\/em> the kernel needs to page in  some data and it can&#8217;t.\n  Rats.<\/p>\n<p>  But who knows, someday maybe it will work.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A collection of limitations (both hardware and software) currently prevent Windows from booting and running off a USB drive. Some of them are described in this whitepaper from WinHEC 2003. Another reason not mentioned in this paper is that during any hot-plug operation, the USB bus is completely reinitialized. Windows really doesn&#8217;t like it when [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-39793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-other"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>A collection of limitations (both hardware and software) currently prevent Windows from booting and running off a USB drive. Some of them are described in this whitepaper from WinHEC 2003. Another reason not mentioned in this paper is that during any hot-plug operation, the USB bus is completely reinitialized. Windows really doesn&#8217;t like it when [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39793"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39793\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}