Recovered image to USB drive not booting
I have windows 10 on a nas drive which is painfully slow, so I made an image of it and have tried restoring it to a128gb sandisk usb3 drive. It starts off like everything is ok but then I get a "inaccessable boot device message". What do I need to do to make this work? I've done a search and did not come up with much.
Thanks
Windows cannot be resored to a USB flash drive or any USB drive for that matter (natively, by design... however, there are 3rd party tools that can make this happen). It's a limitation of Windows do to licensing as the license is tied to the system it has been installed on. Only Windows 2 go, which is a featuer of Enterprise versions of Windows, can be booted off a flash drive or external USB drive.
Windows 10 (as an upgrade from a previous OS) is also licensed to the internal motherboard hardware and will not license on another motherboard or different piece of hardware, so you'd be out of luck getting the license to register with one of the 3rd party tools (perhpas one of them has the capability now, but it would be a an unsupported/illegal install of the OEM license of your Windows 10 upgrade)
You could restore the image to a SATA drive that is housed in a USB enclosure, but in order to be bootable, you would have to remove from the enclosure and attach to an internal SATA port and then boot from it.
What you are telling me explains alot. My intetion is to use on the hardware that it was licenced on but I guess that is not possible. I'm just trying make myself like/ get used to windows 10 and wanted something faster than my nas drive without restoring to my windows 7 C drive , not trying to do anything illegal. I may be wrong but it seems that I remember windows 7 being put on a thumb drive and working ok.
Also what are the 3rd party tools that you mentioned, or is that top secret?
No worries - just want you to be aware of the Windows 10 licensing model because the upgrades from earlier versions of Windows to Windows 10 really are licensed to the hardware - in a way it's really nice as you can restore any Windows 10 image (of the same time - home for home or pro for pro) and it will always license with the new Windows 10 licensing.
Windows has never natively booted from a UsB hard drive. Windows-2-go is the only supported Microsoft solution and that is only in the Enterprise license. However, third party tools can do this too, it's just not a legally licensed version of Windows, but does work and many of these tools are free if you search online and want to go that route.
Not sure if you have some cash to use, but you can get a decent internal SSD which will blow any flash drive (or old spinning NAS drive) out of the water in read and write performance for relatively little money. 120Gb SSD's are like $40-50 on Amazon. 250Gb are only a few bucks more. Even a super low-end SSD will outperform a flash drive or spinning drive in spades. I tend to get Samsung EVO 850's, but price seems to have gone up. If you're looking to make a performance upgrade and don't want to spend a lot, you can get a 240Gb Silicon Power SSD using TLC nand for $50 on Amazon right now. It's not the best SSD, but for price/performance and what you're looking to do, it's a good deal - read the Amazon reviews. Otherwise, spend a little more and get something like the Samsung EVO 750 or EVO 850 which are both fantastic drives.
Just google Windows 2 go alternatives. I can't recommend shady licensed products or competitor products in the forum. One competitor product has this feature as a free tool which is not part of the backup solution.
Money is not a problem. I guess I'll go up to the egg and see what they have for a cheap ssd. that would be the easist solution really. Thanks for taking time to reply.