I have a computer that runs windows xp and have taken a VHD image of the hard drive. I have tested it on VMware and it boots, but it is very slow.
Is it possible to convert the VHD image to a bootable USB stick? I will use it on the original computer so there won’t be any problem with drivers etc.
What the heck is VHD?
Create a VM with the VHD attached, and a USB controller. Plug in your flash drive and attach it to the VM, and boot the VM from a Clonezilla live image. You should then be able to clone the VHD to to the USB drive like any other hard drive.
goldmund, thanks! I’ll give it a try!
It is a Virtual Hard Disk file, not much different than an ISO file, but they are predominantly used in virtual machines
Couple of things.
Doubt you will see any speed improvement. XP likes to do lots of disk writes. Even a USB3 stick is quite slow at writing info.
Also, USB sticks are limited in the number of times you can write to each block in the memory. Windows swap file writing might reach that rather quickly.
That said, if you still have access to the original hard disk I’d try making the USB bootable first, following the instructions here http://www.intowindows.com/bootable-usb/ but substituting /NT52 for the /NT60 in the bootsect.exe stage (tells it that it’s an XP environment it’s going to try and boot).
Then use a Linux live distro to just copy everything from the HD to the USB stick. Linux will ignore windows file permissions and locks. You can probably do that from the VHD if you can figure out how to mount it in linux.
There is a big difference in the speed of USB sticks. I had luck putting linux on thumbdrives before, but recently when I tried it with one with more memory, it was unbearably slow.
I think next time I try that I’ll use SD memory because they have the speed printed right on it.