These days, with hibernation and a large pagefile and all sorts of other stuff, I needed a 256GB USB drive to hold and run it in an optimal form.īut if I disabled hibernation, minimized the pagefile, used a partitioning tool (e.g., MiniTool Partition Wizard in Windows, GParted in Ubuntu) to shrink partitions to just a little above their minimum possible size, and took other steps indicated in that other post, I could still squeeze the WTG drive into a 128GB space. The size of the Win10 installation had grown. As described in another post, I used DiskGenius to clone the Windows 10 installation from my desktop computer onto a USB drive. My working example was my Windows To Go (WTG) USB drive.

I could use a smaller (and slower, and older) USB drive as a physical backup device as long as it was large enough to hold the contents of a larger drive. The primary idea behind the reference drive was that the latest drives were larger and faster.

This post discusses some of the questions and options that came up, as I set about the process of creating and using Windows and Ubuntu USB reference drives. Their purpose would mostly be to just sit on a shelf until a moment of need, preserving their contents without taking space on a data drive and without being vulnerable to whatever might befall such drives. I referred to these little old drives as “reference” drives. But since they were small and old, the better solution in most cases would be to clone them to a larger and faster target drive, and then use the target drive to boot the operating system.

In a pinch, I could run the operating system from one of those drives. It occurred to me that one legitimate end-of-life role for relatively smaller and older USB drives would be to treat them as working physical repositories of recent versions of Windows or Linux system drives.

For instance, they might be stored on a drive that I couldn’t get to at the moment, for one reason or another. Meanwhile, sometimes I found that backup drive images weren’t always an ideal solution. As faster and newer USB drives became available and affordable, I began to accumulate little old USB drives that I didn’t really need anymore.

DesktopOK x64 11.06 instal