How do you turn a USB stick into a drive?
I want to install windows on a laptop without a drive. Of course that doesn't work I wanted to use a USB stick as a drive. But it is not recognized as a drive. Can i change that?
You can either use Rufus to make an existing .iso file bootable on a stick, or you can use Microsoft's Media Creation Tool and instantly make a stick bootable with just a few clicks.
In both cases, the files on the stick will of course be deleted.
The USB stick must be bootable.
You can google how this is done.
But I already have a stick. It works too. My question is what should I use as a drive when the laptop no longer has one. Does a USB stick work as a drive?
What kind of drive?
A DVD drive or do you mean a hard drive?
So. The Windows setup must ask "Where do you want to install Windows?". Nothing is available to me even though I have connected the USB stick. And when I go to browse and select the USB stick, "No signed device drivers were found…" is displayed. This is my main problem. It would be very nice if you could help me.
That will not do. Windows must always be installed on an internal drive (hard disk or SSD).
But you can also boot a Linux distribution in live mode from the stick. Then it runs without installation. It works like this: First you select a Linux distro. For example, I recommend Linux Mint Xfce. Here is the download of the ISO: https://mirrors.layeronline.com/linuxmint/stable/20.1/linuxmint-20.1-xfce-64bit.iso
Then flash the ISO to an empty formatted stick with Rufus https://rufus.ie/de/.
Then boot this stick on the laptop. There one then selects "Try Linux Mint without installation". When the boot process is complete, the desktop appears. It will look like that:
In fact, there are a few sticks that are not recognized by a PC as removable media, but as a hard drive. I have such a stick here and as far as I know it is even possible to install Windows directly on it.
But normally it is not simply possible, especially since most sticks are hardly big enough. My stick is 256GB in size.
However, the ISO image from which I boot the PC must not be on this stick, otherwise it will not be displayed.
How about if you built a hard drive into the device? Smaller SSDs are already available quite cheaply.
If a hard drive (HDD or SSD) is already installed and is not displayed, you will need a special driver. Which you also have to load from the USB stick.
If you want to install Windows on a stick, you need two sticks: One with the Windows installation files (from MS Media Creator, for example) and a second stick, where Windows is to be installed.
You have to try whether the installer (recognizes) the second stick, the idea of installing Windows on a stick has not occurred to me yet.
What I have to do is to install an emergency window on a stick (shown by heise c't, for example), but that is not really a fully-fledged Windows.
Title question: Not at all. You can create a drive on a data carrier. But that's different. 😉
Hello, I want to install windows on a laptop without a drive.
It just doesn't work that way. The way you put it, the answer should be: "Forget it".
Even if no drive is set up on the data carriers, Windows will try to create one during the installation.
If you mean that you have not installed an optical drive (CD / DVD / BluRay), that would of course be a different question.
But let's start at the beginning:
How did you create the installation USB stick?
