Good day everyone! I would like to ask for your help in making a windows installer using wd passport. I tried to rufus but it will format the device first and i dont want to that. Can someone recommend me how to do it ? Thank you in advance!
Cant i just make another partition for it? i am not using a usb , i am planning to use wd passport ultra which is a portable harddrive
No i don't think it is possible but ultra WD Passport is using USB cable so you want to make a usb drive bootable to boot from it to install win10, right ?
I am trying to install windows 10 on my pc ,and i dont have usb flash drive right now, so i am searching if i can use the portable drive instead of the flash drive.
yes i got that but the portable drive works with usb cable, you connect it to your machine through usb cable, right ? your portable hard drive is using usb cable so it works the same way as usb stick, you have to make it bootable to boot from it to install win10 and this can't be done without first formatting it as i mentionned in my first post.
If you can see the Passport as a boot device when you press F11 (that's what it is on my computer) then you are good to go. Remember, if you have UEFI it must be fat32, otherwise it can be NTFS. Then all you need to do is extract the ISO to the Passport. You can also mount the ISO, and copy the files to the passport. It shouldn't matter if you have anything else on there or not. Just put all the extracted ISO files on the main part of the Passport, and boot from it. Just like for a thumbdrive, Rufus is not needed.
Buying an USB key is very chip today. Why not use this way with Rufus or anoter app to make it bootable with the W10 iso?
I believe u cant use a external USB hard drive as a boot device to install a ISO. try it but I don't think it will work.
You do not need Rufus or any app. All you do is format, and copy the files over. Rufus is completely unnecessary.
In my UEFI GPT computer all I did is create an 10GB partition on my WD Passport then mount the ISO file and copy all the files to new partition. It was not the first partition on the WD Passport and I even removed the drive letter before restarting. I did not use EasyBCD or Rufus. I just restarted with my WD passport attached and it booted right to the Windows 10 installation screen. Note: My computer is set to boot from USB drives first and legacy CSM is disabled. I do not think what I did will work with a BIOS MBR setup since MBR requires the boot partition to be set active. I don't have a BIOS MBR setup to test this on.
I am not so sure about BIOS MBR because I think the boot partition must be set to active in order to boot, but I will take your word for it.
Some months ago i tested booting from a usb stick. In a ueft/gpt environment, no need to set the partition active. But when trying to boot from a NTFS formatted sick on my old (9 years old, BIOS/MBR) Dell desktop, i had to set the partition on the stick active. Edit: Once the partition is set active, it remains active after format.