Can I Clone Windows XP to USB Drive?

Why do you choose to clone Windows XP to USB drive?

Windows XP is an ancient Windows system for modern users. However, it also can help tech and relevant people to test some programs and offer valuable data responses. Since it is not popular now, if you install a Windows XP system on your computer, well, it seems not a very suitable idea.

So, if you clone a Windows XP system to USB drive, you can use it when you need it, but in the meanwhile, you can use that target computer to do other things.

How to clone Windows XP to USB drive?

In this post, we’ll show you how to clone Windows XP to USB drive and make it bootable in two ways.

Of course, you know that there is no built-in tool for disk cloning on Windows system, so, the first thing is to seek a handy clone.

In this case, we recommend AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional, a disk and partition management for Windows 11/10/8/8.1/7/XP/Vista. This tool can clone your system disk and keep all boot-need files to make sure the target disk is bootable. You don’t need to reinstall anything. The “Disk Clone” function can help you do all things.

Another feature called “Windows To Go Creator” is to create a portable Windows USB for running on any PC whenever you need it. This function can create an independent Windows environment on a USB. Once you plug it into a computer and boot from it, you can enjoy your Windows, even on a Mac. This system won’t affect the main OS on your computer.

Next, we’ll show you how to clone Windows XP to USB drive and how to create a portable Windows XP USB drive.

Option 1. Clone Windows XP to USB drive

After you plug your USB drive into your computer, we can start.

1. Install and open AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. Choose "Clone"> “Migrate OS” in the top panel and click “Next” in the pop-out window.

2. Choose an unallocated space on the USB drive. If there are partitions on it, tick "I want to delete all partitions..." to generate unallocated space and click “Next”.

3. In this window, you can resize partition as you need, then click “Next”.

4. A note on how to boot from the destination disk will appear, read it carefully and click “Finish”.

5. Click “Apply” to commit the system clone.

Option 2. Create portable Windows XP to USB drive

1. Install and run AOMEI Partition Assistant Pro on your Windows XP computer. Connect the USB drive to the computer and make sure it is detected successfully.

2. Click “Tools” in the top toolbar, and choose “Windows To Go Creator”.

3. Choose "Create Windows ToGo for personal computer" and click "Next".

4. Select the first method "Create Windows To Go with system disc/ISO" and choose the prepared ISO file. Click "Next".

PS.: If the Windows XP ISO files are not available or you don’t want to download or extract the ISO file, you can choose "Create Windows To Go with current system".

5. Then choose the USB drive and click "Proceed" to start cloning Windows XP to USB drive.

After cloning Windows OS to USB via the above methods, you can plug the USB drive into any computer at any place, enter BIOS, and change the boot order to USB first and save. Then you can successfully boot computer into your familiar Windows environment.

To sum up

This concludes the procedure for cloning Windows XP to a USB drive. When it comes to this task, it's essential to rely on specialized cloning software. AOMEI Partition Assistant is the solution of choice, particularly because many cloning tools do not offer support for Windows XP. We are confident that with the assistance of AOMEI Partition Assistant, you can effortlessly carry out the entire process.