Troubleshooting

The standard Windows installer refuses to install to a USB drive, and that’s on purpose. Microsoft blocks it outright, which is a problem if you want a portable, bootable Windows environment you can plug into any PC for troubleshooting or borrowed-hardware work, without installing anything on the machine’s internal drive. The fix: Rufus, a free tool for writing bootable ISOs to USB drives, has a mode built exactly for this, called “Windows To Go”. It writes a full, runnable OS straight onto an external drive, bypassing the installer’s block entirely, and it boots on basically anything with a USB 3.0 port. ...

Search for BCM4332 and Linux and you’ll find years of forum threads with the same discouraging pattern: someone asks for help, someone replies “that chip doesn’t work on Linux anymore,” and the thread dies. That conclusion is wrong, and it’s been wrong every time someone wrote it. The BCM4332 chip works on modern Linux. Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 24.04, Linux Mint, Debian 12 — all of them. But it requires steps that the default package manager doesn’t take automatically, and if you skip any of them, you’ll end up with a chip that either doesn’t appear at all, or worse — works right now but vanishes silently after the next reboot. ...