Installing Windows 8 on USB - The easy way

There are several different guides for installing Windows 8 on a USB disk, which often unpack an installation file of install.wim, which is no longer available with Windows 8.1 and may be difficult to use. So I want to mention two rather easy ways I've found to work for me:

1. Install with a VM

You can setup VirtualBox to use a raw hard drive as one of its drives. If you mount that drive and a Windows 8 installation ISO, you will be able to install Windows very quickly. Usually a simple reboot should be enough to be able to use Windows. 

2. Simply copy the files of an existing installation. (caveat: Apps no longer worked for me, and it was very slow)

3. If booting does not work, manually set up the boot disk

- Copy bcdboot from x:\windows\system32\bcdboot to your windows drive, e.g. C:.

- Use it to make drive X bootable: C:\bcdboot X:\windows /s b:

Of course the target drive X should be a primary partition formatted with nfts already and the partition should be active.

Have fun!