WinToGo is very picky about what flash drives it will use, there a few licensed ones but they cost a lot of money. So I use old laptop HDD's or SSD's in an enclosure. I believe WinToUSB can use any flash drive, but the faster the better.
You rock! You roll! You Rock & Roll! Brilliant and thanks for all the detailed responses. Next time we cross paths.. Lunch is on me I am gonna try all this stuff out and make the transition to a Win 8 .VHD/X sometime soon. Hopefully I wont need to ask you more questions on this journey.. Is there an easy way to convert/ upgrade a Win 8/8.1 Pro to Enterprise (to leverage the WTG functionality)?
I did try Windows 10 Pro x64 build 10162 on the SanDisk Extreme 32GB (speed of up to 250MB/s) with this application Rufus 2.2 but end up boot error 'Inaccessible_boot_device'. So, I start all over again and try WinToUSB with VHD and it was successfully boot up from USB SanDisk Extreme 32GB but I can see there are two drive letters on it C: and E: (I was wondering how to to convert to one drive letter?) I was surprise myself as there is no product key to enter as it was already activated
Do I need a legit Enterprise Serial from a Corporate or will a generic Serial work with the MTK activation etc?
It is normal to have to drive letters when you boot from VHD - one letter (E) is for your Sandisk USB Flash and other (C) is for disk in VHD file. You can't have only one drive letter. On the same type of flash few days ago install successfully 10162 bit 32 bit version by extracting wim file directly on NTFS formated flash with only one partition. In the past do the same with different version of windows, but on slower USB flash drives. They work, but not so fast as SanDisk Extreeme - this is amaizing fast device
I don't think there is a legit corporate key, every one I know uses the default one. But MTK should work just as well As Endbase says I don't think you can 'downgrade' to Pro. But you wouldn't want to either, as your drive would want to be activated again every time you switched PC/laptop. Its the Enterprise KMS activation system that allows WinToGo to work. Although... Pro can also use the same KMS system, the WinToGo creation app won't accept a Pro image as a source. So you'd be back to using WinToUSB.
I was wondering if anyone had a complete guide to put together windows 10? I've tried to source windows 8 to go guides for uncertified windows to go. They don't seem to work the same way. I've tried rufus but have also ran into the error at the end creating the primitives. The WinToUsb works well but I am uncertain about the fidelity of the file system. They have added their own set of files at the end of the install. This creates popups when first launching windows 10. While it may seem like a small issue, it has big implications about what sort of packages or files the authors of the software may have injected without the user knowing. Windows Enterprise is also an unappetizing solution as I would like to be able to do it with a legitimate windows 10 home premium copy.
The official MS way is WinToGo, which only works with the Enterprise SKU and I can't see that changing. Windows 10 will only have three basic SKU's Home, Professional and Enterprise. Anything else is one of those three with a different license. So, any 'Home Premium' version would have to be a Modified or Homebrew version. Which is basically what the WinToUSB guys have done.
maybe they will fix the EUFI portion - to work properly, I'm really tired of fixing all the boot options manually.
To be honest mate, I'm kinda lost with all that partitioning stuff. I saw your other post about it, but understood very little. Like 'cdob' I'm from the 'KISS' school of Engineering/Technology i.e. Keep It Simple Stupid. When I first started to use native VHDs, I used just the one partition. But that was mainly because I was using an old Xbox 360 HDD (20GB) and a 64GB SSD. So maximising space was the important thing. Now, that I tend to multi-boot. Having the boot files on a 'System' partition is handy if/when things go wrong. As one the guys on the other forum said, if you can access your partitions (VHDs in this case) you don't need the recovery partitions. I also stick to MBR/BIOS setups, as I've yet to come across a PC (or tablet) it doesn't work on. It also works in both Hyper-V and VMWare, I haven't tried Virtual Box but it should work there too. And by using VHDs for multi-boot setups, instead of partitions I don't have to worry about the four prime partition limit. Also as mentioned, only have one partition in each VHD, if you want/need a second for storage mount another VHD. Again this works great when multi-booting. Hope that's of some help.