As many laptops no longer come with a disc reader unit (CD, DVD or Blu-Ray), in order to manufacture increasingly thin and less heavy devices, there is no doubt that the number of users is increasing. who use cloud storage every day or continue to use USB sticks or external hard drives for the purpose of backing up their files, or simply for the purpose of transferring them.
When the operating system is malfunctioning, it is sometimes necessary to boot the computer from an optical disc (CD or DVD) or a USB drive. To achieve this, it is essential that this unit has a startup program , which is responsible for taking control of the computer.
Computers are generally set up to look for the operating system on a CD or DVD first, and then look for it on the internal hard drive or SSD drive. But did you know that it is also possible to configure it to search a USB drive first? A useful option is to know how to create a bootable USB , which can be very useful when, for example, our computer does not have a disk reader unit.
What is a bootable USB?
Also known as bootable USB , a bootable USB consists of a flash drive with USB connectivity that is used for the purpose of recovering or reinstalling Windows on a computer, rather than from the operating system installed on it.
This option is extremely useful, for example, when the operating system works improperly, and it is not possible to access it, when we cannot repair the incident or when, simply and simply, the system does not start as it should.
Although today the most common thing is to find the operating system pre-installed on the computer’s system partition, or even Microsoft offers us the possibility of downloading Windows directly from the Internet, on certain occasions we need an external installation medium . In these cases, the bootable USB drive can be very helpful.
You know why? Mainly because it is much faster and more compact than an optical data medium (CD, DVD), adapting perfectly both to the configuration and to the reboot of the system.
Why do we always need a bootable USB?
Although in the previous section we have offered you only a few simple examples, the reality is that there are many uses for a bootable USB drive. Obviously, the most important has to do with starting the computer , especially when it does not start by itself due to a serious system failure, partition-related problems, the existence of a defective hard disk or the presence of a virus.
It is also useful, for example, to update our operating system if a certain previous automatic update has not worked correctly. In addition, it can also act as a “clean” reinstall , especially when the system is running too slow.
Even if no type of incident and / or emergency has arisen in this regard, it is always an excellent idea to have a bootable USB with the operating system we use every day, since we will never know when we would need to use it.
Creating our bootable USB drive in Windows 10
Before starting the process, you should know that you need Windows DiskPart as a program (or any other external tool as long as it fulfills the same functions), a USB drive with at least 8 GB of storage (4 GB of storage will suffice for Windows 10 32-bit), and the ISO file of the operating system in question.
First we must connect the USB drive to the computer. In the Windows start menu we write cmd . When it appears, we right-click and select Run as administrator . Now, we type the diskpart command, and press Enter.
We now enter the list disk command, which will show all available storage devices. We can recognize the USB by the storage capacity, in this case it will generally show as disk 1 .
Assuming that ‘disk 1’ corresponds to the USB drive on which we are going to work, we enter the command sel disk 1 to select it. In order to eliminate all the files that may exist inside the USB, we write clean and press Enter.
Now we enter the command create partition primary to create the primary partition. Then, we write list par and select the new created primary partition, writing sel par 1 . Now, we activate it by typing the active command.
Now it’s your turn to format our USB. To do this, we write the command format fs = FAT32 label = ”WINDOWSUSB” quick override . You should bear in mind that the formatting process may take a while. Once the process is finished, we enter the assign command to automatically assign a letter to the USB drive (for example, “F:”). To finish, we enter the command exit to close DiskPart, and then exit again to close command symbols.
Now, to finish the process, we just have to copy the Windows ISO file to the bootable USB memory . To do this, we just have to drag and drop the file on the USB drive that we have previously formatted.
