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I'm not even sure if an SD Card will allow the necessary partitioning to install Windows! I kinda doubt it.
I'm not even sure if an SD Card will allow the necessary partitioning to install Windows! I kinda doubt it.
This laptop has 100mb of ram (upgrade to 160 soon) and a AMD K6-III processor from 1998 and just about runs xp haha.
I have XP already running on 160mb RAM (128 arrived today) on a spinny Hitachi 20gb disk I just need to attach the SD adaptor to my desktop for benchmarking and imaging from reflect (also arrived this morning).
Hi there
You CAN make Windows to Go to install to an SD (or any other removable device). The main problem of course is that if the BIOS doesn't load the driver on BOOT then the computer won't recognize the SD card until AFTER the OS loads so no go.
On an HP Proliant Gen 8 Microserver for example the BIOS can actually boot from an SD card so it will work in this case otherwise you will need to use Windows to go via a bootable USB device.
Whether the BIOS recognizes a card reader at Boot is a property of the machine - usually they don't although they do recognize USB sticks and external USB HDD's.
Windows to go will only boot from "Bootable" devices.
Running Windows also from an SD card isn't actually a good idea - writes will quickly degrade the card. Even using a USB stick isn't really a sensible option. A USB3 HDD makes perfect sense or even an old LAPTOP HDD with a SATA-->USB2 connector cable will yield adequate performance.
The Microserver has the SD boot possibility because it can make sense to use this for loading a tiny OS like Esxi which doesn't need to perform SD writes and then allows for 5 Bays to be used for attaching HDD's / SSD's and running a load of VM's - or even running a small Linux distro to do the same thing.
Explaining how Esxi works is well beyond the scope of the post or what the OP intended - however I thought I'd add it to show why in some cases (very particular) that an SD card is OK to be used for loading an OS - but normally not a good idea at all for things like Windows with a huge amount of WRITES - which really kills an SD card over a short period of time.
A micro SD card is a smart phone is usually OK because it's used in READ mode probably 95% of the time --Music for example - but an OS like Windows would be doing a whole slew of writes all the time - especially to temporary OS files / data areas / paging files.
(Creating / restoring images on an SD card is fine -- no probs there -- I have a Macrium backup W10 OS on my micro SD card on a smart phone - booting it of course is another issue as explained above).
Cheers
jimbo