2018 Mac Mini - Booting a Windows 2 GO USB key?

[BuddyRich]

Ive just got my 2018 Mac Mini, replacing an old Windows desktop and work gives me a Win2Go USB key instead of laptop for working remotely.

Can I boot this off the Mac? Do I need bootcamp to do so?

I was able to hold Option on a restart and choose the USB key from the menu. The first time I did so I got an error about the security, so I restarted again, and turned on/allowed external device booting. Then tried to boot off it again. This time I got an error about unrecognized boot partition or something like that.

This key worked on my Windows box.

The only hiccup was that the key is secured with bitlocker (MS' own HDD secure option vs. the T2 chip in a Mac) and I didn't get prompted for that password right away. Can Mac work with bitlocker?

 

[FreakinEurekan]

Interesting question, and I've never tried it - looking at this article it appears that a Win2Go USB drive can be created such that it will boot on a Mac. But it involves changing the filesystem of the drive, so your generic company-issued drive probably won't work directly, you'd need to rebuild it specifically for the Mac: https://www.easyuefi.com/wintousb/resource/run-windows-to-go-on-mac.html

Your 2018 Mac Mini also has a T2 chip, which might affect the Win2Go in other ways - I don't see any info offhand about that.