Windows 10 on a USB stick

AddRam as far as I know I completed the tutorial and finished the stick,, I followed all steps and the last thing I did to the usb stick was
bcdboot F:\windows /s F:

I`m talking about cmmtch

I've created a second USB flash drive stick following the tutorial exactly, used the amd64 imagex.exe from the WAIK tools. This stick is a 64G USB3 PNY brand, the image.exe transfer took 61 minutes, the other stick I used yesterday took 207 minutes. Also HD Tune shows 0.8 seconds access time so this stick should be good to go for this project.

The computer booted from the USB/Removable Device and gave the same results as before, Windows 10 logo splash screen and the small spinning dots below that. Waited and waited with nothing more happening (20+ minutes) This doesn't appear to be an install screen, it looks like a boot screen to me. What exactly is happening when that first "boot" screen appears, is it actually installing on the USB stick and I should leave it alone?

Looks like there is something still missing or not being called on the stick that will start the install, it appears to be trying to boot but there's nothing beyond that. I'm trying something else and will post results if any to report.

What I tried was putting one of the files from the WAIK tools folder where the imagex.exe was. There are several other things in the folder besides the imagex.exe. I tried copying a "WimMountInstall" and putting it in the Windows folder on the USB stick, no luck.

Heck maybe the entire amd64 folder should have been included in the image transfer to the USB stick to start the install. Seems like there is something missing between the boot file and the OS image, looks like the boot is starting from the USB but nothing happens. Maybe I need to wait longer, when I click on "Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media" I get the message that it's in use, close all files then try again. There isn't anything on the stick I can see that is in use. This is after I've hit reset to get out of the endless boot screen and reboot back into Win7.

Should the boot screen move along into an install screen, and how long would that take? This is an image of an OS, in the past when I've reimaged my desktop there wasn't an "install" screen, it just installed the image without much user input once the back up image was chosen.

Can somebody point me in the right direction, the tutorial was great, step by step that worked until the point of installing Windows 10 TP on the stick. That's where I'm stuck.

It looks like you have no boot files. Did you run this command.

bcdboot F:\windows /s F:

If yes, is your partition on the stick an active primary NTFS partition.

I made 2 sticks and one SSD and they all work perfectly. Once you have the imagex.exe on your desktop and the .iso in the virtual CD or a real DVD, then you really need to run only the 2 commands.

whs said:

It looks like you have no boot files. Did you run this command.

bcdboot F:\windows /s F:

If yes, is your partition on the stick an active primary NTFS partition.

I made 2 sticks and one SSD and they all work perfectly. Once you have the imagex.exe on your desktop and the .iso in the virtual CD or a real DVD, then you really need to run only the 2 commands.

For Mine I verified yes and yes! Seems after command prompt runs

bcdboot F:\windows /s F:

The boot folder is there but is a hidden folder I went to my folder views and ticked do not show hidden files and folders,, when I did that and then ticked it back to show them the boot folder was gone completely so its not staying for some reason.

EDIT but if I uncheck hide protected operating system files it is still there,, im guessing maybe because I need to "take ownership" maybe? would that even matter??

Playing around with the files is not going to solve the problem. Can you post a picture of your disk management with the stick plugged in. I want to check something.

whs said:

Playing around with the files is not going to solve the problem. Can you post a picture of your disk management with the stick plugged in. I want to check something.

Almost scared to do that,,, lol its messy!
But here ya go.
Volume N: is my usb 32gb

Disk management screen shot. I did do the boot file command again, this time when booting from the USB in my laptop (Dell Latitude E6400, refurbished) I got a Windows 10 screen saying previous installs had failed, it was titled "Recovery Tools" and gave me startup options like safe mode, boot logging, etc... That was something I hadn't seen before. I wanted to post the disk management before trying again in my desktop. Could be the boot file is/was corrupt causing my problem. This is the first time I've gotten anything but the logo with spinning dots below it.

Both sticks look OK as far as Disk Management goes.