How to Make an External Hard Drive Bootable? ★★★ Average to experienced users ★ Experienced users 'Hi, what's the best way to make an external hard drive bootable? Like copying all the Windows boot files to it so that I can boot Windows 10 from the bootable drive. Please, an easier way is much more appreciated.'
Jan 24, 2011 - Out of the box, Windows can not read or write HFS drives, and Macs are. Filesystems to make your external drive is compatible with Macs and PCs. Although it is possible to format a drive as exFAT from Disk Utility on the. If you have an external hard drive or USB flash drive that you’d like to use on both Macs and Windows PCs, choosing the right file system to format the drive can be confusing. Learn a few ways to make your drive Mac and PC friendly.
There are many significant reasons for creating a bootable HDD or USB drive that carries a user's customized Windows operating system. For example, when your PC unexpectedly shuts down and can be never turned on due to hard disk failure or system corruption, you can still easily start the computer from the bootable drive; what's more, restore a full system when a computer's dead or crashed. ①Third-party HDD/SSD/ called EaseUS Todo Backup and ②Windows Command Prompt are commonly used methods to create a bootable external hard drive in Windows 10, 8 or 7. Continue reading the details. EaseUS Todo Backup Applies to: Windows 10/8.1/8/7/Vista/XP (32-bit and 64-bit).
Works on: EaseUS Todo Backup is recognized as the best as well as disk/partition clone utility that includes a highlighted feature called 'Create Portable Windows USB drive'. It's available in the 'System Clone' function. Simply prepare your external hard drive which you're going to make it bootable, and follow the steps to use the software will clone all system files, boot files and other personalized data files to the target drive. After you have installed the EaseUS Todo Backup: Video tutorial: Step guide: Step 1. Connect the external hard drive to your computer and make Windows recognize the drive. Now launch EaseUS Todo Backup and click ' System Clone'.
Step 2. The software has chosen the entire Windows 10 system partition and boot partition by default, so you just choose the external hard drive as the destination drive. In ' Advanced options', there are three extra Windows 10 system clone features for you to choose from.
' Optimize for SSD': tick this option if the destination hard disk is a Solid State Drive. ' Sector by sector clone': tick this option if you wish to clone everything from the source disk including the blank space. ' Create a portable Windows USB drive': tick this option so that the cloned external hard disk is able to boot normally. Step 3. Click ' Proceed' to immediately clone Windows 10 to an external hard drive. You should now create your own bootable hard drive with EaseUS Todo Backup software.
After it's done, you can boot the same computer or the other dead computer from it with no problem. Windows Command Prompt Using software to create bootable hard drive should be effortless, however, if you wish to take a challenge to make your own bootable drive manually without any software, try cmd instead. Format the external hard drive Make sure that your external hard drive has been correctly formatted. When you finished the disk formatting, let's go on with the required command line that makes your drive bootable.
Copy the Windows 10 installer files First, insert your Windows DVD into the optical drive. Click on Start and search for Command Prompt, right-click on it and click Run as administrator then click Yes to continue. On the Command Prompt Admin (Windows + X), enter the command in the following: g: (Where 'g' is your DVD drive letter) cd boot (changes to boot directory) G: bootbootsect /nt60 d: (Where 'd' is your external drive letter) Second, copy all files from the Windows CD to the drive using xcopy by entering the command in the following: cd G: xcopy g:. /s/h/f d: All those commands are used to make your external hard drive bootable. Select the bootable drive at the Windows startup, it will boot Windows immediately.