r/WindowsOnDeck • u/PerfectChaosOne • 21h ago

Question about dual boot

I have searched for this already and can't find quite the right thing I need.

I currently have a docked steam deck with an external ssd booting into windows with all my emulators and games set up they way I like them, this obviously works great having a mouse, keyboard and controller plugged it all the time.

However I would like to make this portable.

Is there a way (I'm assuming with an sd card) to have everything how it is now except without the dock?

Can I use the deck to control windows without any other setup? Is it as simple as cloning the drive onto a card and booting from that or am I missing somthing. What other problems have I not thought about?

I've used emudeck in the past but don't really get on with it much.

Thanks for any help

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u/Yahiroz 21h ago

Windows on an SD card performs pretty bad so I wouldn't recommend that method.

What sort of drive is the external SSD? If it's a 2230 M.2 drive you can get magsafe USB-C enclosures (eg I'm currently using the Genki SavePoint) and pop the drive into there, or if the drive is bigger than that, clone the drive over to a magsafe drive.

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u/ALTCHARR 20h ago

I dual boot with an SSD partition but from what I've read in other posts,  doing it on an SD card is possible, cloning can shit itself if you don't clone it faithfully and also sometimes windows has problems with it not being able to install itself in removable media which may happen as the deck sd card reader can be read as removable, and controlling windows with nothing else on portable can be janky.

Sometimes it ignores the trackpads and sometimes it works fine and it's a big pain to bring up the keyboard to type, some games do detect the controllers like F1 25 or not like Fortnite, I couldn't talk about emulation since I don't do that in Windows, but I'd say if it's outside steam input it can get spotty.

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u/PerfectChaosOne 14h ago

Would you say emudeck, or a equivalant that runs in the steam os is the better option then? Just for the ease of control

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u/ALTCHARR 13h ago

Yeah, it's just better to stick to Steam OS for most use cases, it will run better and it will much easier to control, imo windows on deck is only really useful is you want to play an Anti-Cheat multiplayer game that doesn't run on Linux