How to Boot from a USB Flash Drive

Booting your Windows OS from a USB Flash drive is simple to setup and can save your day!

To do this, you will need two things:

1. a BIOS that supports booting from USB devices

2. a pre-created version of Windows that will run from a USB device

To check #1, simple turn off your computer, reboot, go into the BIOS and look at the Boot Order. It is here that your BIOS should give you the option to boot from a USB Disk or USB Flash device. Ensure that the USB device is before your hard drive so that it will be checked for a boot device before your computer boots the OS from your HD.

To accomplish #2, you will need BART PE Builder and your Windows OS CD (either XP or 2003 Server). Bart PE Builder can be found here: http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/. It will be used to create your bootable OS. Instructions are available at the BART PE Builder website on how to create your bootable OS at this link: http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/#start. For that reason, I’m not going to rehash it here. However, instead of burning a bootable BART PE CD, you want to send the built version of BART PE to your USB Flash Disk.

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Once you have your bootable USB device and you have reordered your BIOS (and verified that USB is even available in the BIOS), you are ready to try it out.

At this point, you are ready to insert your bootable USB device device and boot up your new BART PE Windows OS. Good Luck!

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