WinToGo Free Version for W10 Pro

alphanumeric said:

I just ran Windows To Go on this PC, which is running Education. Kingston DT HyperX 3.0 USB device and got the following message "This is a removable drive and not compatible......". A nice fast USB 3 thumb drive is rejected, but if I plug in my dirt slow 5400 RPM IDE laptop drive in a USB 2 enclosure it will use it.

Exactly my point - I see no reason with version 1703 why it should reject a nice fast usb flash drive now. Either MS forgot, or it is simple politics as they made a big thing about certified drives and they would get "egg on their face" if they retracted that.

wptski said:

Well, do you remember the "W8 Compatible Drive" logo? Those USB flash drives appear as a local/fixed drive(no eject option) and I have a Sandisk 4GB like that. That was later removed from the drives.

It was a Kingston 32GB DataTraveler Workspace drive that I returned unopened.

Some "fixed bit" drives did exist, but the manufacturers pretty much all gave up once the Windows To Go certification standard was introduced.

Anyway, a 4GB one is pretty useless other than partitioning a couple of winpe or linux installs - you need at least 32GB to be of real use for full Windows.

NavyLCDR said:

Well, I would imagine that manufacturers have to pay Microsoft for the WTG certification of their product....

Requiring the certification for WTG to work in native Windows would increase demand for WTG certified drives from basically none to just a little bit more than none

Yeah. In meantime, use the "Poor Man's Window To Go equivalent" with a much cheaper fast usb drive eg San Cruzer Extreme with Wintousb and accept in theory it is less reliable!

wptski said:

You need an option do remove the USB drive while is use? I fail to see anything useful for that.

Then you do not understand how windows caches writing for usb drives. If it waited until all data was written before doing next activity, it would slow down the drive performance. So if you eject drive before the write cache is clear, it can fail to write data and that data is lost. Drives can get corrupted if critical data. The option is there to ensure the write cache is cleared.

However, some modern flash drives are very fast, making this less of an issue than historically. Nine+ times out of ten, removing it will not be a problem but Sod's Law says the one time it is supercritical to you is the one time it will fail on you.

cereberus said:

Exactly my point - I see no reason with version 1703 why it should reject a nice fast usb flash drive now. Either MS forgot, or it is simple politics as they made a big thing about certified drives and they would get "egg on their face" if they retracted that.

I was hoping it would now work. On the one hand they want certified drives for reliability, I get that. But then they let you use some old beat up slow as molasses junker drive.

cereberus said:

Some "fixed bit" drives did exist, but the manufacturers pretty much all gave up once the Windows To Go certification standard was introduced.

Anyway, a 4GB one is pretty useless other than partitioning a couple of winpe or linux installs - you need at least 32GB to be of real use for full Windows.

Some SanDisk drives have the bit set. I had a couple of small SanDisk drives that were that way. Way to small for Windows To Go though, 8 gig I think they were.

I make a habit of using the safely remove hardware option. I set that Icon to stay visible in task manager.

alphanumeric said:

I was hoping it would now work. On the one hand they want certified drives for reliability, I get that. But then they let you use some old beat up slow as molasses junker drive.

Well I will use Feedback and make this point .