Is It Possible to Boot System from an External Hard Disk or a Flash Drive?
A bootable external hard disk or a flash drive is nothing but the drive which holds booting software to boot a system.
So, if working boot files are present inside your external hard disk or a flash drive, then it immediately emerges during system startup, automatically hook the important boot system and start booting the computer on its own.
But, how to create boot files on an external hard disk or a flash drive to make it a bootable drive for Windows? Well, to make an external hard disk or a flash drive as a bootable drive on Windows, you need to do little changes in BIOS settings first.
To do it, follow the below steps.
- Restart your system and press f1/f2/f8 key to reach BIOS
- Next, switch to the Boot menu
- Typically, the CD/DVD boot menu will be located at the top
- Move the Removable disk boot option to the top using the arrow keys
That’s it. Now, you are all set to make your external hard disk or flash drive a bootable drive.
But, before getting started to boot your system either from an external hard drive or flash drive, make sure that your portable drive’s capacity is more than 2GB. And, if you have any important data stored on the portable hard disk/flash drive then backup it completely. Because you need to format the external hard drive or flash drive before you begin.
Note: In case, your flash drive or portable drive is in an inaccessible state or you have formatted the drive without backing up its data, then don’t worry. Just take the assistance of Yodot Hard Drive Recovery. The tool can easily recover files from an external hard drive that won’t mount, are not recognized, are corrupted, inaccessible, etc. It is the trustworthy and efficient way to restore your lost or deleted data from any storage device like HDD, USB drive, pen drive, and more. This robust program is enough potent to lend a helping hand even when you are wondering how to recover lost partitions on the external hard drive, internal hard disk, flash drive, USB drive, etc.
All set? If yes, then start following the below-described step-by-step guidelines to boot your computer from an external hard drive or flash drive.
Procedure to Make Bootable External Hard Disk or A Flash Drive on Windows:
- Connect your external hard disk or flash drive to a working computer
- Launch Command Prompt (Run as Administrator)
- Type the below codes one after the other and press Enter key after each
- First, type the disk part
- Next, type list disk
- Now, you can see disks present in your computer
- Type select disk E (E is the drive letter of the external hard disk or flash drive)
- Type clean
- Type create partition primary
- Type select partition E
- Type active
- Type format fs=32
- Type f:
- Type cd boot
- Type bootsect /nt60 E:
- Finally, type exit to get out of CMD
Now, installation files will be created on your DVD installer. Copy all installation files from the DVD installer to your external hard disk or flash drive. And, you are done.
How to Boot from an External Hard Disk or a Flash Drive?
Step 1: Attach the bootable external hard disk or a flash drive to your computer.
Step 2: Restart the system.
Step 3: Press any key to boot from the external device message and follow it.
Most of the time you won’t see the key-press prompt, especially if you are trying to boot from a USB device; as the USB boot process starts automatically.
Step 4: Now, your system will boot from the external hard disk or flash drive.
Also Read: How to Recover Files from External Hard Drive that Won’t Boot?
