You might want to boot from a USB, like an exterior hard drive or a flash drive, for many different reasons.
When you boot from a USB, what you're really doing is running your computer with the operating system that's installed on the USB device. When you start your computer usually, you're running with the operating system installed on your hard drive - Windows, Linux, etc.
Follow these easy steps to boot from a flash drive, an external hard drive, or some other bootable USB device.
Difficulty: Easy
Time Required: Booting from a USB device typically takes less than 10 to 20 minutes.
1)
Change the BIOS boot order so the USB device choice is listed first. The BIOS is not often setup this way by default.
If the USB port is not first in the boot order, your PC will start "normally" (i.e. boot from your hard drive) with no even looking at any boot information that might be on your USB device.
2)
Attach the USB device to your computer by means of any available USB port.
How do you be familiar with if a USB device is bootable? The easiest method to find out if a flash drive or outside hard drive is bootable is to plug it in and follow the rest of these instructions.
3)Restart computer.
4)
Watch for a push any key to boot from external device... message.
On some bootable devices, you may be encouraged with a message to press a key before the computer will boot to the flash drive or other USB device.
If you do not anything, your computer will make sure for boot information on the next boot device in the list in BIOS (see Step 1) which will almost certainly be your hard drive.
5)
Now your computer boot from the USB.
