If you’ve created a bootable USB drive, you may be wondering if it will initialize and boot properly. You don’t always need to restart your PC / laptop to find out. The techniques below help you easily determine if your USB drive is bootable under Windows 10. They include Windows native methods as well as recommended third-party software.
In this article, Niketrainers.com.co will tell you:
How to make a USB drive bootable
Here’s a quick introduction on how to create a bootable USB drive. For Windows 10 systems, the fastest and most reliable way is to download and installBalenaEtcher. This software easily burns any ISO file to a USB drive.
Many ISO files (the example below is for the Raspberry Pi Desktop) can be huge. It is not always necessary to download the ISO file separately first. Just copy and paste the ISO download link, and the burning to disk will be much faster. All data on the disk will be deleted when creating the bootable media.
After flashing Balen will validate the boot disk, which doesn’t take long.
When the USB disk becomes the boot disk, “Flash Full” will be displayed.
Check the boot status of the USB drive in Disk Management
Open the search in the start menu and type “disk manager”. Select the “Create and format hard disk partitions” entry.
Select the formatted drive (disk 1 in this example) and right-click to go to “Properties”. Go to the “Volumes” tab and select “Partition Style”. You should see that it is flagged with some kind of boot flag, such as the Master Boot Record (MBR) or GUID Partition Table. In addition, bootable ISO removable media will show the status “no volume” or very small volume (only a few MB).
Check the boot status of the USB drive from the command line
Another way to check the bootability of an external drive is to run a few lines on the command line. openedcmd
from the Start menu in administrator mode.
Enter the following commands:
The removable media in ISO format will show “no volume” or a very small volume in MB.
Check the boot state of the USB drive in Windows PowerShell
Even Windows PowerShell can provide a quick overview of the disk’s bootability. Run it as administrator from the search in the Start menu.
Payget-disk
to collect information about the USB drive. Check that the device status is “healthy” and that it does not show any operational status of the media and the 0-byte volume (or very small volume).
Check if USB is bootable with MobaLiveCD
The simplest third-party software to check the disk boot status isMobaLiveCD, a Qemu system emulation software package. In fact, you’ll be booting an ad-hoc virtual machine and trying to boot from USB, so it’s a pretty solid way to check your disk’s boot status.
1. Download the MobaLiveCD .exe file fromthe developer site.
2. When the download is complete, right-click the downloaded EXE file and select “Run as administrator”. If you do not do this, you will receive the error message “Setup was unable to copy kqemu.sys” and will not be able to continue after step five.
3. Click the “Start LiveUSB” button in the bottom half of the window.
4. Select the USB drive that you want to test from the drop-down menu. In this case, I chose the F: / drive. If you’re not sure what the drive letter is, check the Explorer window and find the drive in the sidebar.
5. When prompted to create a hard disk for the virtual machine, click “No” next to the red X.
6. The Qemu emulator will run the USB drive. You’ll also see a command prompt with a small startup text. This means that the virtual machine is trying to boot from the disk selected in the previous step.
7. If you see the startup screen below, your device is booting up. Depending on what you are trying to boot, there may be several boot options as shown below. Press Enter to run orPATKAto edit the menu item.
Using Magic ISO Maker to test disk images
You can also use the free Magic ISO Maker software (admittedly very old) to check if the disk image is bootable. In fact, this works best with the images themselves, but it’s a good way to make sure the image is bootable before burning to USB.
1. Download the Magic ISO Wizard . After installation is complete, open the software and select “Open …” from the “File” menu.
3. Select the ISO file from the menu.
4. Look at the menu bar. If it says “Bootable” then the ISO will be bootable after burning to CD or USB drive. Unless it says bootable, it obviously won’t work in creating bootable media.
Conclusion
The best way to find out if your USB drive is bootable is to try to boot your computer from its drive, but this isn’t always feasible. The above methods will let you find out if your USB drive is bootable.