If you’ve created a bootable USB drive, you may be wondering if it will successfully boot and boot. You don’t always have to restart your computer/laptop to find out. The following techniques can easily determine whether a USB drive is bootable or not in Windows 10/11. These include methods native to your Windows system as well as recommended third-party software.
How to create a bootable USB drive
Below is a brief explanation of how to make a USB drive bootable, and check the boot status of such drives.
1. Using BalenaEtcher
For Windows systems, the fastest and most reliable way is to download and install BalenaEtcher. This software easily burns any ISO file on the USB drive.
- Once installed, open the app and select your current USB drive as the source drive.
- Many ISO files (the following example is for Raspberry Pi Desktop) can be huge in size. Fortunately, you don’t always need to download the ISO separately first.
- Just copy and paste the ISO download link, and it will burn to your drive much faster.
- Once you can see both the source and destination drives, it’s time to hit the “Flash” button.
- All data on the drive will be erased while creating bootable media. In some cases, the USB drive will boot first, which may take some time.
- Wait for the USB drive to start flashing. This phase is seen after the decompression is complete or directly after.
- After flashing, BalenaEtcher will verify the bootable disk, which doesn’t take long.
- You will see the message “Flash Complete” after the USB drive is converted to a bootable disk.
2. With Rufus
Rufus is a common bootable USB disk/drive creator. As an open source application, it is lightweight and you have the option of not installing anything. To know how to use Refus properly, check out this guide.
Here’s a quick rundown on how to create a bootable drive with Rufus.
- Open the Installed or portable Rufus application.
- Insert a USB drive into your computer. Rufus will automatically recognize it as the source device.
- For the destination, click “Select” next to “Select Boot” and select your ISO installation file.
- You can set advanced options of drive properties and format. Make sure the partition scheme in Drive Properties is set to “MBR” which stands for Master Boot Record.
- Click on “Volume Label” under “Format Options”. Give it a name you like.
- Make sure the file system is set to “FAT32” which is the default for bootable drives. Performing a “quick format” will delete all existing files on removable media.
- You can also check the option “Create extended label and icon files” which creates an “autorun.inf” file. “Check device for bad blocks” is optional, as well.
- Once everything is done, click the “Start” button to continue creating a bootable USB device.
Check the boot status of the USB drive from Disk Management
- Open the search window on your PC and type “disk manager”.
- Select the entry “Create and format hard disk partitions”.
- Select the formatted drive (“Disk 1” in our example) and right-click to go to “Properties”.
- Navigate to the “Volumes” tab and check the “Partition Style”. You should see it marked with some kind of boot flag, such as Master Boot Record (MBR) or GUID Partition Table. Also, the media extracted with the bootable ISO will show a “status” like “no volume/no media” or a very small volume (only a few MB).
- If you don’t see the “No Media” status in the USB device properties, it means you can’t create a bootable device.
Check the boot status of the USB drive from the command line
Another way to check the bootability of the external drive is to run several lines at the command prompt.
- open
cmd
From “Search” make sure you are running in Administrator mode.
- Enter the following commands:
- The ISO formatted removable media will show “no media/no volume” or very small volume in MB.
Check the boot status of a USB drive from Windows PowerShell
Even Windows PowerShell can give a quick overview of the drive’s bootability.
- Search for PowerShell using the “Search” functionality in Windows and run it as an administrator.
- to enter
get-disk
to collect information about your USB drive. - Check if the health status of the device is “healthy” and if it shows an operational state of “no media” and 0 bytes volume (or very low volume).
Check if USB is bootable using MobaLiveCD
The easiest third-party software to check the boot status of a drive is MobaLiveCD, emulation software wrapped into the Qemu system. It will actually run a virtual machine (ad hoc) and try to boot from your USB, so it’s a pretty robust way to check the boot state of the drive.
- Download the file “MobaLiveCD.exe” from the file The developer’s website.
- After the download is complete, right-click on the downloaded .exe file and select “Run as administrator”. If you don’t, you’ll get an error that says “Setup can’t copy the file kqemu.sys” and you won’t be able to continue with step five.
- Click the button labeled “Enable LiveUSB” in the lower half of the window.
- Select the USB drive you want to check from the drop-down menu. In this case we chose the “F:/” drive. If you’re not sure what the drive letter is, check Windows Explorer and find the drive in the sidebar.
- When prompted to create a hard disk for your virtual machine, click “No” next to the red “x” icon.
- The Qemu emulator will boot the USB drive. You will also see a command prompt appear with a small startup text. This means that the virtual machine is trying to boot from the drive you selected in the previous step.
- If you see the following boot screen, it means your drive is bootable! Depending on what you are trying to boot, there may be multiple boot options as shown below. to press to enter reboot or Subscription card To edit an entry in the menu.
If you get a message that the USB drive is not bootable, that doesn’t always mean that’s the case, as counterintuitive as it may sound. There is one last method you can try below.
Using Magic ISO Maker to check disk images
You can also use the free (albeit very old) Magic ISO Maker to see if a disc image is bootable. This actually works best on the images themselves, but it’s a good way to ensure that an image is bootable before you burn it to USB.
- taken down Magic ISO Maker.
- After the installation is complete, open the software and select “Open” from the “File” menu.
- Select your ISO file from the menu.
- Look at the menu bar. If it says “bootable”, this ISO will be bootable after burning to CDs or a USB drive. If it doesn’t say boot, it obviously won’t work to create bootable media.
Common questions
What format should a USB be in to remain bootable?
For Windows 10/11, the USB drive should not be in NTFS format. They cannot boot from a USB device. FAT32 format must be used. However, if you’re looking for USB capabilities, NTFS can be used with Windows systems.
Is there a way to tell if the ISO is bootable?
Photo credit: Kaboompics via Paxels All screenshots by Sayak Boral
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