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Put Your USB Drive To Work: 5 Strategies For Going Mobile: Page 7 of 22

If you're already using Windows, you can boot and run Linux in a way that doesn't require you to reboot the system but runs directly from within Windows itself. This neat trick is accomplished by using the Portable Qemu virtual machine system. Another way to do this is to obtain coLinux, a special distribution of Linux that's designed to run on Windows as a Windows executable. Note that setting up coLinux is not anywhere as easy as the other methods described here, so this is for experts only.

Put Your USB To Work


•  Introduction

•  Be Productive

•  Run An OS

•  Maintain Passwords

•  Synchronize Data


•  Encrypt Your Data

•  List Of Resources

How about being able to run Windows itself from a USB drive? Amazingly, it is possible -- albeit with a bit of hackwork and patience, and with some scaled-down expectations about what's possible.

The most reliable and automated way to do this is to use BartPE, a utility that builds a copy of Windows's Preinstallation Environment (hence the "PE") from an existing installation of Windows. The PE is a mini-version of Windows that supports only a basic subset of Windows' functions, but it's still possible to do a great many things with it like perform data recovery or even run applications that don't need to be installed to operate correctly.

Note that Windows's licensing restrictions requires that you have a spare copy of Windows whose license you can devote to using in the BartPE environment; MSDN subscribers will probably find this restriction easiest to deal with, since they can typically spare an extra XP installation out of the pool allotted to them. Other people have created detailed instructions on how to take a BartPE installation and put it on a USB drive, although your mileage may indeed vary with this technique.