USB Thumb and hard drives are great for storing information away from your computer and for backing up important files you don’t want to loose.
Just like your hard drive inside of your computer, your external hard drive or USB drive can store information and actually work exactly how your internal drive does.
That is, if you do not want to boot from your computers hard drive, or temporarily want to boot from a USB drive, with a couple of changes to your system can be done very easily.
Disclaimer
Before you try and boot your computer from an external hard drive I do not recommend doing this unless you have the experience and have all your data backed up safely to another drive or drive.
There is a risk you could also reconfigure your computer to the point it no longer boots up so only try this if you have the experience and technical know-how and everything backed up already.
What would you want to Boot from your USB Drive
How to Boot from your USB thumb drive
Why Boot from a USB
There are many reasons you might want to boot from an external hard drive. You current hard drive probably has Windows on it.
If your current operating system is encrypted it might be harder to access, but listed below are the three main reasons why you might want to boot from an external hard drive like USB, rather than your internal hard drive already on the computer.
Booting From a USB to Diagnosis current hard drive
Rather than pull your current hardware apart, sometimes it can be beneficial to analyse it in its current state.
This can be hard to do when the hard drive is not functioning properly. Booting from a USB for diagnostics and help with this problem and allow you to analyse your hard drive and current computer configuration in its normal state.
Tests can include, hard drive and memory diagnosis and other important components like graphics card and even scanning your hard drive for virus if it is not booting up properly from infections of Malware.
Booting From a USB to try a new Operating Systems
Sometimes its fun to play around and test new operating systems such as Linux.
The problem is you don’t always want to buy a new hard drive, or set up another in place of your current internal drive just to test one.
A lot of Operating Systems now have live boot options where you can run the . Operating system from the extern al USB and test it out, without compromising your current computers setup.
Booting From a USB to Recover Data from failing Boot Device
There is nothing more worrying than your computer crashing and loosing all your data,
The data is stored on your hard drive, and just because your computer doesn’t boot up, it doesn’t mean your data is always gone.
There are a couple of ways to mount a hard drive onto another computer, but if you don not have another machine to test, making a Bootable USB to run your computer on and recover your data from your internal drive (just like it was attached like a USB) might be a quick and easy way to recover your data.
