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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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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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