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How to Install Windows 10 from an External Hard Drive
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December 28, 2018 Trisha 3 Comments
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It so happened this week that my old favorite USB 3.0 pendrive stopped working. I have used it to
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install Windows a zillion times. I have USB 2.0 pendrives but they are very slow when copying or reading
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les. So I decided to use my external hard drive as the installation media to install Windows 10 on my
Computers with Same Keyboard and
new laptop. Here  are the steps I took to successfully install Windows 10 using an external hard drive:
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Note: Before beginning, make sure that you have downloaded Windows 10 ISO image from Microsoft
Chrome and Firefox
servers and have installed 7-Zip in your PC. The external hard drive should have only one MBR partition.
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for Windows 1. Attach your external hard drive to your PC using the USB cable.
Wondershare UniConverter : Convert 2. Right-click on the external hard drive in File Explorer and select Format. Select le system to be NTFS
Media Files and Burn DVDs and choose Quick Format in the formatting dialog.

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with FAT32 Filesystem in Windows

3. Right-click on the Windows 10 ISO image le, select 7-Zip → Open Archive. Then extract all the les
from the ISO to the external hard drive.

4. Open an elevated command prompt. Assuming F: is the drive letter for your external hard drive, give
the following commands:

cd f:
bootsect /nt60 f: /force

5. Now we have to use the diskpart tool to make the partition on external hard drive bootable. For this,
in the elevated command prompt we give these commands:

diskpart
list disk
select disk 1
list partition
select partition 1
active
exit

Assuming that “list disk” displays the external hard drive as the disk no. 1 and the “list partition”
displays the partition no. 1 for the rst partition in the external hard drive.

6. Now you can reboot your PC and when press F12 to select a boot media when the PC is about to start.
Select the “Mass Storage Media” from the list to start the Windows 10 installation.

If your computer is not able to boot using the external hard drive, then try turning o the PC and the
external hard drive both rst and then power them up at the same time. This is because some portable
hard drives stop spinning when Windows is rebooted.

Related Posts:
1. Install Windows 7 from USB disk
2. How to Install Windows or Linux from External USB Hard Drive Using Rufus
3. Install Applications Silently in Windows Using Silent Install Helper
4. How to Format External Hard Drives with FAT32 Filesystem in Windows

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3 thoughts on “How to Install Windows 10 from an External Hard Drive”

Soren says:
March 29, 2019 at 5:18 pm

Excited to try this out!

Reply

Fredrik says:
March 29, 2019 at 1:49 pm

So anyone know how to prepare that external drive with Ubuntu? :’D
I was able to delete my whole Windows installation…

Reply

Anon says:
February 28, 2019 at 5:12 am

Hi I would just like to say this is the most underrated page on the entire internet. I have been searching,
reading, and watching videos for hours trying to gure out if there was a way to install Windows without
a USB stick or DVD (because honestly who still uses those).

Finally I found this page and it saved my life.

THANK YOU SO MUCH

Reply

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