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A similar question has been asked before, but my situation is different since I have 128 GB RAM installed on two computers (got them from work after they upgraded their cluster).

I have used WinToUSB to create a USB that can run Windows 8.1 directly from it without having a harddisk in the computer. After boot, I would like to be able to make Windows run entirely from RAM, so I can unplug the USB stick.

If I do this on both machines, they can run without harddisks until I shut them down. Is this possible to do?

G Backen
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    Have you tried? – Ramhound May 08 '17 at 16:46
  • Very much related [RAMDISK OS? Installing Windows 10 on a ramdisk](https://superuser.com/questions/985332/ramdisk-os-installing-windows-10-on-a-ramdisk) and [Is it possible to run Windows 8 entirely from RAM after boot?](https://superuser.com/questions/509883/is-it-possible-to-run-windows-8-entirely-from-ram-after-boot). – Mokubai May 08 '17 at 17:23
  • "Is it possible to run Windows 8 entirely from RAM after boot" does not offer any solutions at all. – G Backen May 08 '17 at 18:15
  • "RAMDISK OS? Installing Windows 10 on a ramdisk" offers two solutions, but they both involve creating a permanent ram drive that reads from a hard disk at boot. I'm looking for a way to boot from USB and somehow migrate the installation to RAM without restarting. – G Backen May 08 '17 at 18:22
  • I believe Windows will always expect the media it boots from to be available for the entire Windows session. – I say Reinstate Monica May 08 '17 at 18:53
  • It would be difficult for Windows to function without the boot media being present. It certainly wasn't designed to work that way. When writing to the registry the initial write will be to RAM but at some point it will attempt to write this to the boot media. I don't know what will happen if that fails but it can't be good. When Windows boots it creates a lock on many files on the boot media. What happens when those files disappear? – LMiller7 May 08 '17 at 19:29

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No, there is no such thing as running Windows without its boot media.

Windows is a demand-paged virtual memory operating system. There is no mechanism for forcing everything you might ever need (some of which isn't even defined yet, e.g. some processes haven't even been started yet) into RAM. If there was, you likely wouldn't have enough RAM to do that anyway. Not even with 128 GB.

(I just checked the total virtual address space for all processes on this machine. It's over 170 terabytes. Not gigabytes. Terabytes. Now granted some of that would be shared between processes and some of it is reserved rather than committed memory. On the other hand it ignores kernel address space! So this illustrates the magnitude of the problem.)

Jamie Hanrahan
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Not sure if this is what you are asking, but I have had a USB for several years with W7. It loads Windows into RAM and all changes done are lost when computer reboots. To save any changes you have to enable EWF and then all changes are written onto USB when shutting down. FYI, it's W7 embedded.

Livan
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