Sandisk Extreme 64GB - make it a fixed drive?

Used the testmode command and ran the .bat as admin, and got this error.

Solved it by partitioning the drive like this

I realized my error of not reading documentation, GPT obviously didn’t work. Created 60GB NTFS part under MBR and installing it atm, I assume that will work so thanks for help

All works,  diskmod.sys is unnecessary , just use WinToUSB 2.1

It’s nice to see so many people saying “THANKS”  to me after helping them out.

<sarcasm>

Thank you everyone so far for the guidance.

The following solution finally worked for me with a removable drive on both BIOS and UEFI :

  1. Format the drive using Rufus 2.1 (Rufus adds a custom UEFI NTFS loader so that UEFI can boot from NTFS instead of FAT32)
        - MBR partition scheme for BIOS or UEFI computers
        - File system: NTFS
        - Create a bootable disk using: UEFI:NTFS (make sure to toggle advanced options using the white arrow)

  2. Install Windows 8.1 into VHD using WinNTSetup 3.7.7
        - Mount your Windows-ISO and choose “install.wim”
        - Create VHD (fixed or dynamic, both work)
        - Make sure that drive letters are correct
        - Click “Setup” to install

I hope this is helpful to anyone. I’ll add some images later.

Here are some pictures for my post above (which I could not edit).

Let me know if this works for you :slight_smile:

Hi,

Can you please let me know how your system performance is when windows is installed like this ?

I have tried installing windows 2 go in different ways, but each time the flash drive performance dropped so much, it was almost unusable. After repartitioning/reformatting a few times, the drive became so sluggish it’s barely usable to copy anything on it, writing speeds are oscillating between 17KBps and 20-30MBps (copying large files, not booted from it). 

When booting w2go there’s lots of microfreezes and lagging, not really usable as a working environment.

thank you very much in advance…

Hi,

thanks for mentioning the performance issues. I have the exact same problem: At first writing speeds look ok but have sudden drops to almost 0. The more I use the device (without even running Windows To Go, just copying files) the slower it gets until it reaches a constant speed of <5 MB/s. However I’m not sure its W2G causing the performance drop - as I said I have just copied some large files. The only solution for me is to do a FULL format (NOT quick format) on the device. After that the writing speeds are around 180 MB/s again without any drops. I have no idea what is causing the slowdown and why a full format restores the original speeds - maybe someone from SanDisk could explain the behavior?

I searched more on the forums, and it seems there are quite a few people with this problem, with no response from Sandisk whatsoever. I opened a ticket to find out if there’s any development from Sandisk side on this issue.

Found a helpful postthat got me thinking about repartitioning and realigning partitions in the original configuration.

According to it, the original partition alignment is 32k, with the 1st cluster at 32k and formatted with 32k clusters.

All I managed using diskpart was to create an aligned partition at 32k and format it with 32k clusters, but didn’t find any way to align first cluster, which appears to be at 4k instead of the original 32k when I partition with diskpart.

After that I formatted to FAT32 with AOMEI Partition Wizard, since I couldn’t find anything else to let me format such a large partition with FAT32. HP USB format tool does format, but it repartitions too with other alignment, and I didn’t want that.

The result is that the flash is “almost” reset to the original performance, it writes at 190MBps (originally it wrote at 210MBps speeds). As soon as I reformat it to NTFS, the performance drops to an average of 2MBps, and severely oscillating, instead of writing continuously.

Still, I find it an immense PITA that there’s no way to format to NTFS without rendering it absolutely useless performance-wise, and I’m thinking of returning the drive, since there are other options that are close to that performance, less sensible to NTFS formatting and a lot more support.

If anyone has any idea, feel free to step in.

If I’m not mistaken 64GB drives, and up, are formated as exFAT not FAT32.  And thus handle files larger than 4GB without needing to be reformated to NTFS.

I just bought this flash drive and what do I find? That it doesn’t work as a Windows To Go host!

It’s incredible that SanDisk hasn’t released a tool to make it compatible it this “technology”. Not only enterprise users are interested in personal workspaces. Even my **bleep**ty Kingsten DataTraveler has an unofficial tool that can convert the drive into fixed.

The VHD trick is fair enough, but I’m sure it has a severe performance penalty.

Please, someone to shed a bit light on the topic. This drive would be wonderful it wasn’t for this.

I just bought this flash drive and what do I find? That it doesn’t work as a Windows To Go host!

Didn’t read the Microsoft Windows to Go hardware webpage?

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/Hh831833.aspx#wtg_hardware

Years ago SanDisk did make a drive that was fixed for a short while but they stopped making them, I assume because there wasn’t enough demand for them.  And the architecture difference was much more than just flipping a bit.

Kingsten DataTraveler has an unofficial tool

Are you sure the “tool” isn’t just a driver to make the drive appear as a fixed drive, on the machine with the tool/driver installed?  Or are you talking about bootice?

I have a Micro PC that came with an extremely small HD.   I just bought a Sandisk Ultra 128gb and want to clone the HD onto it and always boot from it.

Will this have same issues ?

Possibly but not necessarily.  You may have different problems.  1. Windows doesn’t support installing to a USB drive.  2. If you clone your Windows system from the hdd to the USB drive Windows may not run because the drive’s signature will be different than the installed drive’s signature.

A possible approach is to leave Windows on the hard drive but put all user files and folders on the USB drive.  A Windows 7 system will run fine on a 40 GB hdd that way. 

I just bought a Sandisk Ultra 128gb and want to clone the HD onto it and always boot from it. Will this have same issues?

Return it, if you can. W/O changing the flash card into fixed drive, witch is (except for user on page 2 of this thread) ATM impossible to do, you cannot make it as reasonable system drive. Yes, you can use ton’s of tricks, but in the end Windows will only see ONE partition on removable device, so, you are screwed.

I bought specificaly SanDisk with the naive hope, that I can use their utility to flip the switch to fixed, but no. That utility is old and it does not work on modern drives… so lame.

I had the same problem - purchased a Sandisk Extreme Pro 128GB to use as Win2Go and could not set it up, so I used this simple method.

Requirements:

  1. Download and install AOMEI Partition Assistant (Free edition).

  2. Obtain a cheap second USB flash drive which can be set up for Win2Go. I had a USB3 Sandisk Ultra Fit 128GB (bit slow), but an old USB2 TDK flash drive also worked (very slow).

Using AOMEI Partition Assistant for ALL the following steps:

  1. Create Win2Go on the second USB flash drive. There is no need to reboot and complete the Windows setup.

  2. Create Bootable media on the Sandisk Extreme Pro.

  3. Delete the newly created partition on the Sandisk Extreme Pro, leaving a hidden partition which we cannot see.

  4. Disk copy from the second USB flash drive to the Sandisk Extreme Pro.

Finally, remove the second USB flash drive and reboot the PC from Sandisk Extreme Pro. It should now boot successfully and complete the Windows installation.

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Incidentally, the disk copy function in AOMEI Partition Assistant is also a great way to make a backup of your USB Win2Go to another drive, but not when you are actually running the system from Win2Go. If you need to recover your system, simply use the same method in reverse.

I don’t think it is a good idea to use imaging backup software, because it is difficult/impossible? to recover using the their recovery media.

Did anyone find a good solution to flip the removable to fixed? I recently purchase a sandik ultra 128GB and I’m having the same issue.

I tried bootlt but it didn’t work.

I used flashboot from 2.3 and I can install windows 8, 8.1 enterprise edition onto the Sandisk CZ80 (showing up in win 7 as a removable drive) and can boot from it.  However, windows 10 enterprise failed.  Both windows 8 or 8.1 will no longer boot after windows update.

Thank you! this worked!

However, this thumb drive seems to slow in the range of 4KB blocks. Does anybody know how to improve the performance!?

Anyways, I’m looking for a better USB drive for Windows To Go. Could you please recommend me one that doesn’t experience so severe performance slowdowns?