can you boot from an external hard drive

Select the “Mass Storage Media” from the list to start the Windows 10 installation. Now you can reboot your PC and when press F12 to select a boot media when the PC is about to start.1 for the first partition in the external hard drive. 1 and the “list partition” displays the partition no. For this, in the elevated command prompt we give these commands:Īssuming that “list disk” displays the external hard drive as the disk no. Now we have to use the diskpart tool to make the partition on external hard drive bootable.Assuming F: is the drive letter for your external hard drive, give the following commands: Then extract all the files from the ISO to the external hard drive. Right-click on the Windows 10 ISO image file, select 7-Zip → Open Archive.Select file system to be NTFS and choose Quick Format in the formatting dialog. Right-click on the external hard drive in File Explorer and select Format.Attach your external hard drive to your PC using the USB cable.If you have some files on the external hard drive, make a backup of these files on some other device. The external hard drive should have only one MBR partition (you can use MiniTool Partition Wizard to create an MBR partition). Note: Before beginning, make sure that you have downloaded Windows 10 ISO image from Microsoft servers and have installed 7-Zip in your PC. Here are the steps I took to successfully install Windows 10 using an external hard drive: So I decided to use my external hard drive as the installation media to install Windows 10 on my new laptop. I have USB 2.0 pendrives but they are very slow when copying or reading files. I have used it to install Windows a zillion times. It so happened this week that my old favorite USB 3.0 pendrive stopped working.

Can you boot from an external hard drive