If you can find a way to connect an SSD to the deck, I’m not sure if it’s SATA or whatever, if it’s connected and recognized, I don’t see a reason why the deck couldn’t boot from it. Not speaking from personal experience, all hypothetical, I could be wrong. Worth a shot if you understandably don’t want to do a fresh windows install
Steam Deck
A place to discuss and support all things Steam Deck.
Replacement for r/steamdeck_linux.
As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title
The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.
Some more Steam Deck specific flairs:
[Boot Screen] - Custom boot screens/videos.
[Selling] - If you are selling your deck.
These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.
Rules:
- Follow the rules of Sopuli
- Posts must be related to the Steam Deck in an obvious way.
- No piracy, there are other communities for that.
- Discussion of emulators are allowed, but no discussion on how to illegally acquire ROMs.
- This is a place of civil discussion, no trolling.
- Have fun.
Hold the volume down button while booting to get to the boot menu. If you get a bootable drive connected, it should show up there. You could connect your windows ssd and it should work fine.
However, the steam deck needs its drivers for the GPU, Bluetooth, and similar. If you plan on swapping back and forth, that may not play nice. Installing portable windows to an SD card really ended up not being that hard and I'd be happy to link you to a guide if you needed one.