Does windows to go not work?

Question

Microsoft

Good afternoon.
I read that in Windows 8 it was possible to install on a USB flash drive or an external USB drive. It seemed to me an ideal option - it does not affect a working laptop in any way and there are no performance losses, as is the case with a virtual machine.
There were many recipes on the Internet on how to install windows 8 in windows to go mode from under the seven, I used this . The only "but", you need to do without formatting the hard drive. It seemed real to me, because it was already formatted in NTFS, and all you need is to saddle it active. The standard Disk Management helped me with this.
Then everything is according to the instructions:

1. G:\Windows\system32\bcdboot.exe G:\windows /s G: /f ALL
   
2. copied G:\windows\system32\bcdboot.exe from the unpacked image to my C drive:
   
3. C:\bcdboot.exe G:\windows /s G: /f ALL
   

The next step should have been to reboot and select the USB HDD to boot the system, but that was not the case. The problem is that my laptop Lenovo thinkPad E520 does not want to start from this disk. A black screen appears for a couple of seconds, and then I return to the boot device selection menu again. No error messages appear (maybe there are some errors, but the laptop thinks that I don’t need to know about them, I don’t know).
At the same time, he used to run the installation of windows7 from a USB flash drive without any problems. Unfortunately, now there is no way to check it again, due to the lack of a flash drive.
I read that sometimes Windows pretends to set the active flag for a partition, but does not save it. I checked in Linux - the bootable flag is set.
This is where my ideas ran out.
Does anyone else have any options on how I can install windows8 on a USB HDD without formatting the latter?

Answer 1

Good afternoon!
Most likely, your boot code on the USB disk is corrupted or missing. You need to restore it. First look at WinHEX, for example, if there is a code in sector 0 of the physical drive. Then see if there is any code in sector 0 of the partition that Windows is on.