The normal method of creating a USB by dragging-and-dropping or copy-and-pasting files to a formatted USB drive is insufficient to create a bootable USB. This is a very important point that bears repeating: simply copying a recovery ISO image or file to a USB does not work.īootable USBs are very different from the normal USB drives you use to save or transfer files from PC to PC. It’s important to create the bootable USB. Your PC is designed to automatically move on to a different boot device, so if your USB stick isn’t actually bootable, you will not get any warning or message when you plug it into your PC and try to start up from it.

The default for any USB drive is to not be bootable. This guide will help you figure it out and start your PC from the external recovery media. If you’re unable to get your PC to start from a correctly-created bootable USB, even after following our guide on booting from USB drives, it could be any one of many things. 1.6 Don’t directly open the downloaded ISO image.1.4 Are you on Windows 8/10 or an EFI/UEFI PC?.

1.3 Make sure the USB is formatted as FAT32 and not NTFS!.

1.2 Make sure the PC is set to boot from the USB Drive.

1.1 Make sure the USB really is bootable.

Re image a pc