In the old days, people commonly booted their computer from CDs and even floppy disks, but those days are long gone. Now, if you need to troubleshoot your PC, boot from a different version of the ...

Most people won't ever need to do this.

Connecting an external hard drive to a computer before turning on the system can confuse the device when loading the operating system. When a computer hangs after the BIOS splash screen while being ...

In cases where you are unable to boot into Windows and cannot access your files, you can create a bootable drive and use the media to boot and repair your OS installation on your device. In this post, ...

So you want to take Windows 8 for a spin on a computer that doesn’t have a disc drive? Not a problem. While Microsoft has only released a disc image of Windows 8 Developer Preview, you can use the ...

Every Windows PC usually starts from the built-in hard drive, as the term “Windows PC” implies. This is because the Microsoft operating system is not anchored in or with the hardware, but is installed ...

There are a bunch of tools that let you load an operating system onto a USB flash drive, allowing you to boot from that drive and either run or install the OS. But most of those tools are only ...

October 22, 2014 Add as a preferred source on Google Add as a preferred source on Google Make Tech Easier shows us how to get up and running with VirtualBox from a bootable USB drive. To do this, ...

Your USB drive should be able to store and boot as many operating systems as its storage capacity allows.

Portability is a huge advantage that Linux enjoys over most other desktop operating systems as most major distros work very well when installed to a flash drive. However, there are still machines in ...

A friend of mine asked me to fix his USB flash drive. It's an HP 4GB drive. My notebook is running Windows 7 64-bit. When I connected the drive to my computer, Windows installed the drivers but it ...

Editors’ note: This post was originally published on March 13, 2012, and is periodically updated. If your new Windows 10 computer takes a long time to boot up, that’s likely because it runs on a ...