SG Broadband Community

Howdy all. It's been a few years since I monkeyed with multi-boot systems. Seemed a lot more straightforward when doing it with a BIOS/MBR setup. What I am looking to accomplish is a dual-boot (Win10/Win10) system with the 2nd install being on an external USB HDD/flash drive. The reason for this is the guy uses particular software that is very tedious to get running on Windows 10, and once it does get running Windows update will install something (typically some .net framework update I think) that makes the software unusable. For the past few months the guy has just turned off the wifi radio since non-enterprise win10 doesn't allow you to turn off automatic updates. This is a Lenovo Yoga 700 with a 128GB SSD. He really likes the laptop and wants to use it for his email and internet browsing, etc. while he travels. So I suggested the dual boot thing.

Anyways, it's been a nightmare. Regular windows installer will not install onto a USB or firewire drive. I have been trying to get Windows to Go set up but after I mount the .WIM image to the drive I cannot set the drive to active and cannot boot to it. Also, I was hoping there was drive/partitioning software that had a UEFI boot manager. Right now the only way to get a boot manager to show would be to use the system boot manager, but on this laptop the F keys cannot be used to pull up a boot manager or bios setup or recovery. You have to press a teeny tiny recessed button with a paperclip on the side of the machine (WTF, Lenovo?). This would mean the guy only being able to boot to a different device if he happened to have a paper clip or whatever on him.

Any ideas on how to go about this? Or should I cut my losses and avoid the headache?

Thanks, guys!

I'm not a windows expert. But I have the impression that there isn't an easy way to install Windows on a USB.

As for USB booting and partitioning: You could try the opensuse 13.2 live KDE cd (available HERE). That should UEFI boot, and "gparted" should be on the booted system.

I have an old HP elitebook that I've been trying to install linux on without success because of UEFI....just won't boot to USB. Really frustrating.

Anyway, regarding your situation... Another solution that you might want to consider is just running the second Win10 OS in a virtual machine. Virtualbox is free, and VMware has a free version that works well. The nice thing about doing it this way is once you have the OS setup just right for whatever it's purpose is, you can save a snapshot of that state and just load that up as needed. Or just have it as a backup in case an update or something slips by and screws things up. The only downside being that you don't have access to all the computers resources from the same OS at the same time.

On some Lenovo Yogas you have to press the [Fn] (orange) key to access the [Fn] keys... The small recessed pin-button on the right by the power button is for reset/recovery AFAIK.

I would try the Virtual Machine suggestion as well, unless it is some CAD software that needs to pull all the machine resources.