Have a USB boot drive handy should you ever need to reinstall Windows 10 on your PC. You can troubleshoot an old PC at your home. In addition to common issues to look for, there's another task you ...

Want to try or install a Linux distribution (distro) on your computer? Making a bootable flash drive with an image of the distro is the simplest route these days. I've done it dozens of times, and ...

Margaret T. wants to boot from a flash drive and work on documents from there. You’ll need to get an operating system onto the flash drive. You’ve got a number of ...

We all need to start from scratch sometimes and if you're building a new PC, chances are you'll need to learn how to make a bootable USB drive. This will enable you to boot your PC directly from a USB ...

When your PC stops booting, a boot drive is the electronic version of a defibrillator. If you can boot your PC, you can detect bad memory, chase bad sectors, change passwords, and recover data … all ...

Bootable hard drives. Creating a bootable hard drive in Mac OS X is not difficult, but is still a significant undertaking. The most common method is to boot from a Mac OS X Install disc, run the ...

This article is for people whose Macs came preinstalled with Mavericks. If you can download the Mavericks installer from the Mac App Store, you should instead use our standard instructions for ...

Flash drives are convenient for making backups of files as well as copying data from one computer to another. These small memory devices are portable and only require ...

After all, flash sticks aren't the most reliable boot drives ...

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 last month's column, I described the hurdles that Mac OS X puts in your way when you try to create a bootable disc, especially a custom bootable CD, DVD or flash drive. I offered various solutions ...