John O’Brien’s PC can’t boot from a USB drive. Every PC needs a way to boot into something other than the installed operating system. Removable boot media allows you to repair your Windows ...

Rufus is a free, portable utility that creates bootable USB flash drives from ISO files. As of 2026, the latest version is Rufus 4.13 — and it’s faster and more capable than ever, with built-in ...

We all need to start from scratch sometimes and if you're building a new PC, chances are you'll need to learn how to make a bootable USB drive. This will enable you to boot your PC directly from a USB ...

Why I never go anywhere without an emergency rescue flash drive ...

If your Chromebook does not boot into the operating system anymore, you can create a recovery USB flash drive and use it to reinstall a copy of Chrome OS on your computer. Google provides a tool ...

As someone who extensively writes about all things Windows, I find myself installing the Windows operating system quite often. Most of the time, these installations are geared toward setting up ...

A bootable Mac OS X thumb drive comes in handy when you need to troubleshoot OS issues for yourself, your family, or your friends. It’s also extremely useful for keeping your basic setup consistent ...

Update: Before you try all of this, you may want to try using WinToFlash, a utility designed to create a bootable Windows flash drive for Windows XP/Vista/7/Server. If this works for you, you can skip ...

I've made a couple of flash drives On a couple different sticks with a couple different computers. With different boot drive making programs and different disk images. and tried to boot from USB On ...

When Windows fails, this tiny USB drive takes over.

Flash drives are convenient for making backups of files as well as copying data from one computer to another. These small memory devices are portable and only require ...

Historically, booting a Raspberry Pi required an SD card. However, if you follow [tynick’s] instructions, you can get a Pi 4 to boot from the USB port. Combine it with a small solid state disk drive, ...