@Peter Blaise] In other words, it is not made for the normal user. Only for those who repair PC
That’s my guess.
And not made “for” those who repair PC, but made “by” someone who repairs PCs.
I often see a tool someone develops for themselves or on contract for a customer, then they try to sell that tool to the public, and it seems an odd, awkward tool, and when researching who they are, we find they are a servicer themselves, not a programmer, hence the lack of development of their offering from version to version – they are not taking care of the customers who purchase their tool, they are taking care of themselves and their own use of their own tool ( they are happy, and think we should be too ).
Win to HDD expects the user to have other resources in order to make Win to HDD work, specifically, we all seem to mention the need for an additional partition manager software, and the need to have Microsoft original resources like a Windows CD and or “wim” files *, as well as having a personal technical mastery of Windows disk partitioning schemes ** ( primary, secondary, invisible boot partitions, versus operating system partitions, and so on ) as if we end users were all Microsoft Certified Computer Builders and Windows Administration Technicians.
Though this is all learnable, the programmers of Win to HDD expect each user to master and manage low level programming protocols, their program is not a simple “point and shoot”, it has no sophisticated intelligence of it’s own, for example, it asks what the user wants the target partitions to look like … I don’t know nor care, I just want Windows to boot and work.
Most of us have enough challenge learning a program, we should not also have to learn stuff outside of the program in order to learn stuff inside of the program.
I have other solutions to make a bootable Windows drive:
– a cloning drive bay for ~$35 from Microcenter, insert 2 drives, push a button, it copies one to the other, no computer needed ( then it acts like a USB expansion drive bay for external drives when it’s not being asked to duplicate a drive, so I can use it all the time ).
– cloning software from many vendors, including free versions that intelligently copy and resize the contents of a working Windows drive onto another drive of larger or smaller size, including migrating from hard disk to solid state disk.
– Microsoft CD or CD-to-USB-thumb-drive original Windows installation media, which either arrived with a computer, or I downloaded free from the manufacturer’s support sites, and this original Microsoft Windows installer intelligently takes a blank hard disk or solid state disk and makes it into a bootable Windows disk, I just point and shoot.
All three of those are self-managing intelligent solutions that do not require the end user to figure out the low level programming and disk partitioning schemes.
As a computer user, I’ve got better things to do than stop what I’m using the computers for, and instead, learn low level programming and partitioning schemes.
If I were a service/build/repair-shop that makes new computers or repairs old computers all day, every day, I would not have to stop what I’m doing to learn low level programming and computer partitioning schemes because that’s what I would be doing all day, every day, anyway – that is presumably a matching customer for Win to HDD.
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* A WIM file is saved in a file-based imaging format that was introduced with Windows Vista. It allows a single disk image to be deployed to multiple computer platforms. WIM files are used to manage files such as drivers, updates, and components without booting the operating system image. The Windows Imaging Format is a file-based disk image format. It was developed by Microsoft to help deploy Windows Vista and subsequent versions of the Windows operating system family, as well as Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs, wimlib pipable variant, disk image, developed by Microsoft Corporation.
** Disk partitioning or disk slicing is the creation of one or more regions on secondary storage, so that each region can be managed separately. These regions are called partitions. It is typically the first step of preparing a newly installed disk, before any file system is created. Each operating system platform has its own way of partitioning a drive. Windows 10 can use as little as four primary partitions (the MBR partition scheme), or as many as 128 (the newer GPT partition scheme). The GPT partition is technically unlimited, but Windows 10 will impose a limit of 128; each is primary.
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Note about me, I “repair” PCs for a living, actually, I support people who use PCs, so I have been fixing broken PCs, and building new PCs, for the past 50+ years … and I have never been able to successfully incorporate Win to HDD into any functional use, and if the program makes itself obtuse to me, me, a tech since before the IBM PC, then I understand why others in the reviewing section here at SOS also find Win to HDD to be useless, or, for those who like it, I presume they just happen to be on the same wavelength as the programmers of Win to HDD, and they also have the other resources at hand, and they are not distracted by conditions that do not match the conditions expected by the programmers of Win to HDD.
We all have something to offer, and I’m glad Win to HDD has found some folks who can benefit from their tools.
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