Gents, I am trying to figure out the best way to make an image that I can copy onto a SSD USB drive to "test" stuff in a controlled environment.
Basically, I want to be able to tell me PC to boot off a USB drive and be able to blow that image away and put a clean one on at will.
Any suggestions as to the best way to do this? I am hoping I can make an image somewhere on my hard PC and just copy that to the SSD drive when I want a clean Windows environment to play around in.
Windows on a USB drive for testing.
- norbs
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Windows on a USB drive for testing.
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- Cursed
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Re: Windows on a USB drive for testing.
Without thinking too hard about it, how about have two hard-drives/SSD/whatever. Have normal/dirty OS installed on one and the clean installation on the other. You might then use the BIOS to choose your boot drive depending on which environment you want.
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Re: Windows on a USB drive for testing.
That sounds perfectly reasonable. I just need a way to blow away the dirty image and copy the clean one back on once I have tainted that copy of Windows.Cursed wrote:Without thinking too hard about it, how about have two hard-drives/SSD/whatever. Have normal/dirty OS installed on one and the clean installation on the other. You might then use the BIOS to choose your boot drive depending on which environment you want.
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Re: Windows on a USB drive for testing.
Does your testing require you to be able to play games or not? If not then you could use virtualbox for your testing.
You could also make snapshots to rollback the image. Or after a clean install just make a copy of the virtual disk file. Then whenever you want to go back to it you can just copy it back over.
You could also make snapshots to rollback the image. Or after a clean install just make a copy of the virtual disk file. Then whenever you want to go back to it you can just copy it back over.
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Re: Windows on a USB drive for testing.
No games. And excellent, didnt even think of that. Thanks Darren.DarrenM wrote:Does your testing require you to be able to play games or not? If not then you could use virtualbox for your testing.
You could also make snapshots to rollback the image. Or after a clean install just make a copy of the virtual disk file. Then whenever you want to go back to it you can just copy it back over.
Sarc ; my second favourite type of gasm.
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Re: Windows on a USB drive for testing.
Yeah a VM with a static sized partition would be really good.
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Re: Windows on a USB drive for testing.
Then boom all gone when powered off.
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