Starting your PC from USB

Why start your PC from USB?

Starting your PC from USB can be necessary to fix the software on the PC.

It is generally used to (re)install a new operating system, or rescue data.

Preparations

What you'll need:

  • A bootable USB drive, such as a Windows installation media or Linux USB

  • A PC to start from USB.

  • The manual of the PC, Motherboard or the bootmenu key.


NOTE: Some Operating Systems, such as Linux, will not work natively with a system that has Secure Boot enabled in the BIOS. In order for those to work, you will need to disable secure boot.

WARNING: If you have device encryption enabled, this will trigger Bitlocker to ask you for a recovery key in order to access your files.

Starting your PC from USB

Boot your PC from USB. Sometimes PCs are configured out of the box to do this automatically when a device is inserted at bootup, but others may not.

To force your PC to boot to USB, you may need to hit a specific key during startup. This is usually a key like F2, F6, F8, F10, F11, F12, ESC or Del. The key will differ from PC to PC. It is usually specified in the PCs manual or the Motherboard Manual. We are looking for the boot menu key. Once in the boot menu, select your installation media. Here Windows is installed in a VM from a virtual CD drive, however for you it is a USB device.