The general steps to install Windows OS on a USB flash drive are like this:
- First, create a bootable USB flash drive.
- Second, download the Windows image on the bootable USB drive.
- Third, go into the BIOS settings, set the USB as the boot priority and choose to boot from USB.
But here comes the problem, you took the right steps and enter into the BIOS environment with success, only see that the bootable USB drive not showing up there! Why doesn't BIOS recognize or detect the bootable USB flash drive then?
Why Doesn't the Bootable USB Drive Show up in the Bios
Here we have many thinkings on solving a bootable USB not working problem, which appears to be missing somewhere. You may perhaps have attempted to reconnect the USB installation media for several times, but why the computer still doesn't recognize it? Answers are now given.
That is not the issue. The problem is that the XPS 13 simply does not recognize the USB stick when trying to boot from it (after adding the entry). It appears to work in older XPS 13s with the USB 2.0 slot. However, as far as I can tell, no one has gotten it to work with the USB 3.0 slot. I tried unetbootin-linux-377 under Ubuntu 9.04 i386 but it does not list any USB stick (I have one connected and mounted, fs is NTFS). If I enable the Show All Drives I see it, sdb and sdb1.
1. USB Connection Issues Resulting from Loose or Broken USB Port
Solution - Try to connect the USB drive through every USB port that is available to use on either a desktop or laptop. If necessary, find another working computer and repeat until completely exclude the factor of a not working port.
2. Incorrect BIOS Settings
Solution - You must configure the boot order sequence in BIOS settings so that your computer can make its own decision which physical device it should select to boot from. So, to make BIOS correctly detect your USB drive and pick it to boot the computer, make sure that you choose the USB as the boot sequence priority.
To make bootable USB show up in BIOS, try to specify the boot order:
- Depending on the BIOS manufacturer, press and hold ESC, F1, F2, F8 or F10 during the initial startup screen, a menu shall appear.
- Choose to enter the BIOS setup and select the BOOT tab. System devices appear in order of priority.
- To give a USB device boot sequence priority over the hard drive, try to move the hard drive device to the top of the boot sequence list, expand the hard drive device to display all hard drives and move the USB device to the top of the list of hard drives.
- Save and exit the BIOS setup utility.
Besides the fixed BIOS settings, some experienced users suggest disable Safe boot and change the Boot Mode to 'CSM' or 'Legacy' instead of 'UEFI'. So, you could possibly take this piece of advice!
3. Making Bootable USB Flash Drive Is Unsuccessful
Solution - Have you checked whether your USB is really bootable or not? Some people didn't see a USB drive appearing in the BIOS boot menu only because the 'bootable' USB drive they've created is not bootable at all! Especially by means of using cmd to create bootable USB drive without any software.
To deal with bootable USB drive not showing up or recognized the issue in BIOS boot menu in Windows 10/8.1/8/7, a piece of USB bootable software could help. For example, EaseUS Todo Backup offers a feature to install Windows OS on a USB drive that ensures 100% bootable on any other computer. That is to say, using this system backup software to create a new bootable USB drive from scratch, you can easily repair bootable USB flash drive that is not showing up, detected, read or recognized!
Preparations:
- Make sure that your USB or flash drive has enough free space - larger than the system disk.
- Connect the USB to your computer.
Then, you can start to copy or clone your Windows 10/8/7.
Unetbootin Not Recognizing Usb Mac
1. Launch EaseUS Todo Backup and click System Clone. The current system partition and boot partition will be automatically selected.
2. Choose the target drive - the USB flash drive as the destination disk to clone Windows 10/8/7. Click on Advanced options and then Create a Portable Windows USB drive.
3. Click Proceed to start to cloning Windows 10/8/7 to your USB.
Awhile back I wrote about ‘Doing battle with a Dell R620 and Ubuntu‘ where I touched on the fact that booting from USB thumb-drive was a painful problem. In short, the same USB thumb-drive that would work in the R610 would not work in the R620.
It comes down BIOS support for USB and how it is handled. On the R610 there are 3 options: ‘auto-detect', ‘floppy emulation' and ‘hard drive'. Auto was hit-or-miss, floppy would not work but ‘hard drive' worked every time. On the R620 there are no options so I can only suppose that it supports ‘floppy emulation' upon detection of a USB thumb-drive.
To try to find the cause of this problem we tried using the ‘standard' method of taking Precise 12.04 ISO from Ubuntu's website and using UNetbootin to create a USB thumb-drive that did boot on the R620. It turns out there was something wrong with our process that prevented it from booting. In comparing the partition table (with parted) of our USB thumb-drive and the Precise thumb-drive we noticed that the starting position of the first (and only) partition were different!
Non-booting USB:
Model: TDKMedia Trans-It Drive (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdc: 3999MB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 1049kB 3998MB 3997MB primary ext4 boot
Booting USB:
- Make sure that your USB or flash drive has enough free space - larger than the system disk.
- Connect the USB to your computer.
Then, you can start to copy or clone your Windows 10/8/7.
Unetbootin Not Recognizing Usb Mac
1. Launch EaseUS Todo Backup and click System Clone. The current system partition and boot partition will be automatically selected.
2. Choose the target drive - the USB flash drive as the destination disk to clone Windows 10/8/7. Click on Advanced options and then Create a Portable Windows USB drive.
3. Click Proceed to start to cloning Windows 10/8/7 to your USB.
Awhile back I wrote about ‘Doing battle with a Dell R620 and Ubuntu‘ where I touched on the fact that booting from USB thumb-drive was a painful problem. In short, the same USB thumb-drive that would work in the R610 would not work in the R620.
It comes down BIOS support for USB and how it is handled. On the R610 there are 3 options: ‘auto-detect', ‘floppy emulation' and ‘hard drive'. Auto was hit-or-miss, floppy would not work but ‘hard drive' worked every time. On the R620 there are no options so I can only suppose that it supports ‘floppy emulation' upon detection of a USB thumb-drive.
To try to find the cause of this problem we tried using the ‘standard' method of taking Precise 12.04 ISO from Ubuntu's website and using UNetbootin to create a USB thumb-drive that did boot on the R620. It turns out there was something wrong with our process that prevented it from booting. In comparing the partition table (with parted) of our USB thumb-drive and the Precise thumb-drive we noticed that the starting position of the first (and only) partition were different!
Non-booting USB:
Model: TDKMedia Trans-It Drive (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdc: 3999MB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 1049kB 3998MB 3997MB primary ext4 boot
Booting USB:
Model: TDKMedia Trans-It Drive (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdc: 3999MB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 32.9kB 3998MB 3997MB primary ext4 boot
Unetbootin Usb Installer
The choice to do 1MiB was to increase the lifespan of the thumb-drive by aligning the partition to the erase-block size of the thumb-drive. Doing this however renders ‘floppy emulation' a non-option on both the Dell R620 and R610. Setting it to 32.9KiB also means that the drive is not properly aligned and you will get bad performance when writing, reading and health of the thumb-drive itself.
In the interest of getting bootable thumbdrive we ended up doing this:parted -a none /dev/sdb 'mkpart primary 0 -1 set 1 boot on'
What this does is create a primary partition at the start of the thumb-drive that goes all the way to the end. We ignore the alignment problems and set the partition to bootable. After that, it was easy enough to through our ext4 filesystem on top and syslinux/casper to get our custom installer working.
The end result is that we now have a USB thumb-drive that boots on a R620 every time.
