How to boot your computer from a USB flash drive.
Sometimes you’ll need to get your computer to boot from a USB drive instead of the hard disk. Most likely this’ll be when you’re trying to boot to install or repair your Windows installation.
Unfortunately there isn’t a single recognised way to get either a Windows 10 or Windows 11 computer to boot from your USB drive.
It would be nice if all the motherboard and PC manufacturers could agree on a single key or key combination that would interrupt the normal boot process. But that’s not happening at the moment.
Set Windows To Boot From A USB Flash Drive.
By far the easiest way to boot into a USB flash drive is to use Windows itself. That’s because of its graphical user interface. It’s just point and click.
To change the boot order from within Windows you’ll need to open the Windows Recovery Options.
Click the Start button and then type “recovery“. Click Recovery Options (System Settings).
On the Recovery page, under the Advanced Start-up section (Windows 10) or Recovery Options section (Windows 11), click the Restart Now button.
Your computer will restart so be sure that you’ve saved anything your working on before you do this.
Boot From USB Drive.
After your computer has restarted it’ll be in recovery mode and should open at the “Choose An Option” screen.
To boot from a USB drive, click the “Use a device” option.
Then, on the “Use a device” screen, you should be able to see your USB flash drive.
Usually you’ll see your USB drive listed as the makers name such as Kingston, SanDisk or Integral etc, but it could be anything.
Your computer will re-start and when it does it should be booting from your USB flash drive.
You may have to wait a while, especially if you’re booting to a Windows flash drive, because the files will load slower.
If You Can’t Boot To The Desktop.
You can still use Windows to boot from a flash drive, even if you can’t get Windows to boot into the desktop.
If you can at least get to the Windows login screen, you still have a chance.
Hold down the SHIFT key on your keyboard. Then click the power button in the lower right corner of the login screen.
Keep holding the SHIFT key down and click on Restart. You have to click the Restart option, not Shutdown or anything else.
That should restart your computer into the “Choose an option” screen we looked at earlier.
Booting From USB Drive By Using The One Time Boot Menu Hotkey.
Most computer and motherboard manufacturers have a hotkey pre-set that you can use to access the one time boot menu.
To use the hotkey, turn on your computer and immediately start tapping the designated key on your keyboard.
To find which key you should be tapping, you really need to consult the documentation that came with your device. Here is a quick list of some of the most popular manufacturers hotkeys.
Note that this is not a definitive list, these are just the ones I either know about or could find. Manufacturers have an annoying habit of changing the hotkey every now and then.
Computer Manufacturers
Acer – Esc, F12 or F9
ASUS – Esc or F8
Dell – F12
HP – Esc
Lenovo – F8, F10, F11 or F12
Samsung – Esc or F12
Toshiba – F12
Motherboard Manufacturers
MSI – F11
Gigabyte – F12
ASUS – Esc or F8
Asrock – F8 or F11
Using these hotkeys is a bit hit & miss until you find the right one. It can be frustrating and time consuming.
Sometimes you just won’t be able to find the correct hotkey to open the one time boot menu for your computer. It could be that there isn’t one on your particular, or maybe it’s been disabled in the UEFI/Bios. Either way you still need to boot from your USB drive.
The only option now is to change the boot order in the computers UEFI/BIOS.
Here are a few of the most popular hotkeys Esc, F1, F2, F10, F12 and Del.
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