Often there is a need to immediately reinstall the operating system or boot the system, to save data when the computer is no longer able to turn on, a useful thing comes to the rescue - a bootable USB flash drive. The process of writing an image to a USB flash drive is faster and more reliable than CDs, DVDs, which are losing their popularity.
The purpose of the bootable USB flash drive
A bootable flash drive is a good helper when recovering and crashing the operating system. It is a standard flash drive with a certain amount of memory that allows you to record an image of the operating system. With it, you can boot or install the system if the operating system is not present on the computer or does not start. A bootable flash drive is convenient when there is no CD / DVD drive on the computer, and the installation is much faster.
Using a bootable USB drive, you can also format and restore computer hard drives, track system breakdowns, test operating memory, and restore the OS after a virus infection. A bootable USB flash drive is useful when the computer does not boot from the hard drive, but you need to save important information.
How to create a bootable USB flash drive
Most often, a bootable USB flash drive is used to install an operating system. In order to create a bootable device with an operating system, you need a system image. You can download it via the Internet.
First of all, you need to format the USB flash drive. This can be done using Windows tools. To do this, go to "My Computer" and when the flash drive icon appears, right-click, select the "Format" section in the drop-down list. In the launched window, click the "Start" button.
Next, you need to write the image of the operating system to a USB flash drive. There are many programs for creating a bootable USB flash drive, but the most popular of them is UltraISO. You can download it on the Internet in a search engine, type the request "Download UltraISO." Since this is a paid service, you need to press the "Trial mode" button when starting it.
In the installed program, you need to open an image of the operating system with the extension ".iso". To do this, in the main menu item "File" select the section "Open" and in the window "Open ISO file" select the downloaded image.
The next step is to burn the image, select the "Boot" section in the menu and select "Burn hard disk image …". In the image recording window, select the USB flash drive where the operating system will be recorded, use the "USB + HDD +" recording method and press the "Record" button.
After the end of the recording process, the bootable USB drive is ready for use. To start a USB drive from a computer, you need to enter the BIOS and set the first "First Boot Device" disk in the "Boot Device Priority" section - a bootable USB flash drive. After the reboot, the installation of the operating system will begin directly from the USB flash drive.
A bootable USB drive is a useful device for system recovery. If you burn Windows 7, a 4 GB flash drive is enough. It is better to use 16 GB in order to put a lot of necessary programs on a USB flash drive.
