Booting windows from a usb hard drive

In addition, you can also use Rufus and Command Prompt to create one. This guide shows you the three different ways to create a USB flash drive installer for Windows As such, it's a good idea to get this sorted before moving on to the three ways to create a Windows 11 USB stick.

Rufus is an open-source utility to format and create a bootable USB flash drive for the Windows operating system. Once done, Rufus will show a success message. After that, you can use the Windows 11 bootable drive to install the OS on a compatible system. Related: How to Clean Install Windows Media Creation Tool is Microsoft's inhouse solution to create an installation media.

Privacy policy. The steps described on this page assume you have Windows installation media and access to a Windows technician PC. If you're looking for an easy, automated way to create a bootable USB Windows installation drive, see:.

If Mark Partition as Active isn't available, you can instead use diskpart to select the partition and mark it active. Optional: add an unattend file to automate the installation process.

For more information, see Automate Windows Setup. If your image is larger than the filesize limit:. Windows Setup Technical Reference. Step 6. Choose whether to use BitLocker in your Windows 10 flash drive or not.

If you choose to use it, you will be guided to set your password to unlock the drive in the future. Step 7. The USB drive will be reformatted and any data on it will be deleted.

Step 8. Then, follow the guidance. It seems easy, right? Now, free download it and have a closer look at how it works:. Choose the first option. If you want to make bootable external hard drive with the current system, you need to upgrade to Professional version. In the pop-up window, the inserted USB will automatically be selected as the bootable device. Step 5. In the pop-up window, the Win 10 ISO file will be listed.