Hasleo WinToUSB

About Hasleo WinToUSB

A portable system on a stick solves a specific set of problems well. A technician carries a known good environment with their own tools on it and boots any machine into it, a locked down workstation gets used without touching its internal drive, and a failing laptop keeps working from an external drive while its own is replaced. That is what this builds.

The source can be an installation image, a physical installation disc, or an existing installed system on the machine's own drive, which is the interesting one: an entire working setup with all its applications and settings clones onto the stick and boots elsewhere. Both the older and newer firmware boot paths are handled, and both partition schemes are supported.

There are two ways the destination is laid out. A traditional install writes the system directly to the drive, which is fastest to run. A container based install keeps the system inside a single file on the drive, which leaves the rest of the stick usable as ordinary storage and makes the whole system portable as one file.

The unlocked editions add the pieces that matter for anyone doing this repeatedly: creating media from a live installed system, deploying the same build to several drives at once, encrypting the portable system so a lost stick is not a data loss event, and a rescue variant that boots into a recovery environment when a machine will not start at all.

What is included in this build

• Installs a full desktop system onto a USB drive that boots on other machines
• Sources from an installation image, an installation disc or a live installed system
• Traditional layout for speed or container layout keeping the rest of the drive usable
• Support for both older and newer firmware boot paths and both partition schemes
• Cloning of an entire working setup with its applications and settings
• Deployment of the same build to several drives in one operation
• Encryption of the portable system against loss of the drive
• Bootable rescue variant for machines that will not start

Changed in version 10.8.1.2

• Faster writing to high speed USB and external solid state drives
• Improved boot compatibility with newer firmware implementations
• Better handling of source images containing several editions
• Fixed a case where a container install failed on very large drives
• Refreshed interface language files

Installation walkthrough

These steps assume a clean machine. If a previous release of the same application is present, deal with that first, since an overlapping install is the most common cause of a setup that stops halfway.

1. Use a fast USB drive or an external solid state drive, since a slow stick makes the result unusable.
2. Back up the target drive first, as building the portable system erases it completely.
3. Extract the archive and run setup as administrator, since direct disk access requires it.
4. Pick the traditional or container layout before starting, since changing it means rebuilding.
5. Test the finished drive by booting it on a second machine before relying on it.

System requirements and file details

Frequently asked about this title