Possibly one of the worst experiences ever is when
you go to turn on your computer and it just won't boot up, no matter what you try and you have
no idea why. Or maybe you do know exactly why, but by that point you can't boot into Windows
or whatever OS to fix it. So in this video, I'm going to give you four different bootable
USB drives that you can make on your computer now that has all kinds of different recovery tools
on them. So that when disaster does strike, you will be prepared. And this could be whether
Windows won't boot at all or maybe you have a virus that is protecting itself so you can't
delete it while Windows is running. And I do keep saying Windows, but only two of these
bootable USBs are Windows specific. The other two are going to apply no matter what kind of
computer you're using and still should be useful. And by the way, if you don't have a
bunch of these dries lying around, you get them dirt cheap on Amazon, like five of
them for 32 gigabytes for less than 20 bucks. All right. So the first boot drive I'm going
to talk about is Hiren Boot CD PE. It's not actually a CD. It just used to be called that so
they kept the name. It's basically a Swiss army knife of recovery tools. It has a whole bunch
in every different category. You boot up and then you can run all of them outside of Windows
or whatever operating system if you have to. Now the original Hiren Boot CD which was really
popular, actually stopped being updated in 2012. But some of the supporters of the project actually
took over and kind of continued updating it. And now to this day, it's called PE because it runs
on Windows PE, which I'll mention in a second. And you can look on the website. Of course,
like everything, I'm going to put the links in the description. You can see a list
of all the different programs currently in it. And these will be pre-installed on the
USB drive that will be runnable through the environment when you boot into it. And when you
do boot into it, it runs what's called a Windows PE or pre-installation environment, which is
basically an extremely lightweight version of Windows 10. It's not meant to be a Windows version
you'd run for your normal project. It's just for running outside of an operating system.
And of course it does boot right from this USB, which means it doesn't install to a drive
or anything. It doesn't mess with your current hard drive or installation. It
runs completely on its own. So in here, you're going to get some of the standard Windows
programs that come with, basically every version of Windows like Command Prompt, Notepad, Disc
Manager, just some tools that are useful. And also some useful third-party programs are
also installed like Chrome and Firefox. You got a bunch of hard drive tools for
partitioning, imaging, for diagnostics, data recovery. You can see all sorts of
stuff and a couple of antivirus programs, which obviously are helpful if you
get infected. There's also some boot record tools like easy BCD in case your
boot record is messed up or something. Of course, a lot of this stuff is advanced. You might not
even need all of it or know what to do with it, but sometimes it's simply just nice to be
able to have a familiar interface of Windows, to be able to maybe copy files off of it and
go in there and see all the files in there, have peace of mind that they're still there, and
be able to copy files off onto a backup drive before you reformat or something. And it's really
easy because you already know how it all works. So even just being able to navigate through
files is useful on its own. All right, now, before we continue, I do want to
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a month. So I'll put that link also right down in the description. And with that being
said, let's continue. Alright so moving on, the next bootable USB drive is an Ubuntu Live
USB. Ubuntu of course is a distribution of Linux. So this could be useful if you have to
do anything in Linux that you can't do in your Windows operating system, especially
if Windows isn't booting. And just like the other ones, it again runs right off the USB
drive. So it's not manipulating any files on the computer or anything. Now it does have
the option to install Ubuntu on the computer, but I probably wouldn't do that. It might
overwrite the boot sector of the operating system that you're currently using. So don't
do that unless you know what you're doing, but you can still just click try Ubuntu and
get right into a Linux interface. And here you can see, there are some included programs
that might come in handy. You could, again, just browse through the files, although
it's a little bit different interface than Windows than you might be used to, but
it's still something that's pretty useful. And of course, because it's not Windows, you can
access any files without having to worry about any kinds of permissions stopping you from
copying files. I think that is still actually possible with Windows PE, but you definitely
don't have to worry about it in Ubuntu. Some especially useful programs you might need to
use are GParted, which is a partition editor, which can come in real handy if you have to
reformat a drive or extend or reduce a partition, something like that. And of course, there's the
trusty Terminal, which you can just use for an uncountable number of things really. Alright
moving on to number three. The third bootable USB drive you have is a copy of the Windows 10
installation media set up as a bootable drive. This is going to contain an entire copy of the
Windows operating system so it allows you to not just boot and use a couple of tools that I'll
mention about, but it will also allow you, if you need to on whatever computer, install an entire
copy of windows 10 from scratch, clean install. But of course, if you already have Windows
installed and it's just not booting correctly, it also has some tools that are helpful for
trying to repair it. So after you put it up, you click repair your computer, and then go to
troubleshoot. And basically it's going to have a bunch of different tools you can see here such
as start-up repair. You can try and see if that'll fix it automatically. You have the command prompt
if you want to do something with that. You can also access system restore points, which is really
important. This is one of the first things I would try. If you did something recently and it messed
it up, you can go to a restore point from before you did that. And also you can uninstall recent
updates in case it just messed up after installing an update, you can try and undo those. There's
also a couple options for restoring a system image, which you probably don't have. That's like
if you copy a exact copy of your computer onto a drive or something, and also you can boot to the
UEFI settings, which is basically just your BIOS. So of course, this one's really useful to have
because of all those recovery tools that are available to you. And it's just kind of nice to
have the ability to do a fresh, clean install of Windows on some computer. That way you don't have
to go searching to download the installation media every time. Finally, the fourth bootable USB
drive you should have is a Windows 10 Recovery drive. Now on the surface, this is going to look
really similar to the Installation Media. You might be wondering, "wait, what is the difference
here?" But there are a couple key differences that I'll mention. So basically when you go to
create a recovery drive for Windows, it's going to do the same thing as one of those recovery
partitions, you may have hidden on your computer. When you boot into it, it's going to look really
similar to the Windows 10 installation media. It just does not have the ability
to install a fresh copy of Windows, but it does have the ability to factory reset
your computer back to what it did when it was just fresh from the factory and when you got
it. This is different in an important way from just doing a regular clean install using the
other installation media. And that's because when you create the recovery drive with Windows, it
basically stores some of the system specific data and programs that came with that computer.
For example, if you bought an LG computer, sometimes it comes with LG specific software
and drivers for that computer or HP or whatever, you know how sometimes it comes with
whatever program they had installed, you might call it bloatware, sometimes not.
It'll basically, from my understanding, create a drive that recovers, not just the blank
version of Windows, but also that stuff too. And it puts that on the recovery drive. So it
really does recover it to the point where you got it from when you bought it off the shelf, which
is different than if you did a blank, completely clean install of windows. So to do this, when you
boot into the drive, you should see a new option called "Recover from a drive". I say, you should,
and we'll get to that in a second. But basically this is the option that does the same thing
as "Reset your PC" if you were able to boot into Windows, you know the the "reset PC", same
idea here, except it's doing from the drive. But there is one major caveat, which apparently
seems to be some kind of bug. And that is, you might not actually see this option, which
is kind of the whole point of the recovery drive if you use it on a certain type of system,
specifically one that boots from an NVMe SSD, which I do, and therefore I can't actually
see that option that's supposed to be there. In fact, when I couldn't see at first, I
thought maybe they've removed this feature, which would have been weird, because that's kind
of the whole point of the recovery drive. But then I found this bug article or bug page. I don't
know what it is on Microsoft's website. And it describes this issue exactly, which is that this
option to recover from a drive is not available if you're booting from an NVMe. And it does
say here, Microsoft is aware of this issue. So I don't think it's supposed to be
like that, but just be aware that if you are booting from an NVMe SSD,
which could include laptops, for example, the memory is just soldered onto the board.
It's not a SATA drive or something like that, a lot of laptops have that. Note that
this might not even work on your laptop. So it's good to probably maybe test that
out before something bad happens. And then you'll just kind of be aware of that. Now
I'm not a hundred percent sure that's why it's not showing up, but both of my computers have
NVMe drives and it's not showing up for them, so I'm assuming that's why. However, I do
still think it's probably worth it to create this recovery drive. There might be other
ways to use it that I was not able to find. Maybe in the future when they patch it, then it'll
still be useful again. And of course it does have those other tools, just like on the installation
media that are helpful for recovery. Alright so now that you know about those four different boot
drives, I'm going to show you how to make each one. And of course they're going to need four
different USB drives that are completely free, don't have any important data on them. And if you
do have important data on them and you want to use that, copy it all off because you are going
to wipe all of these drives. They can only be used for this particular use, each one. For the
recovery drive, that should be at least 16 GB. It's going to depend on how much data it needs to
back up to be able to recover, but it'll tell you. Next for the Windows installation drive,
that's going to need to be at least 8 GB. For the Ubuntu Live CD, it says that should be at
least 4 GB. And the Hiren Boot CD doesn't need to be very big at all, only ~2 GB are more. So let's
start off with the Windows 10 recovery drive. Now you're going to have to do this, for it
to work effectively, on the same computer you intend to use it on to recover, because of
course it's storing a lot of data specific to that computer. So if you have multiple computers,
you potentially want to be able to recover, then you're going to have to maybe make
multiple drives, but maybe just do it on your main computer. Anyway, open up the start menu
and just search for "recovery drive" and then run where it says, "create a recovery drive".
And then when it comes up, you want to check, this is important, "back up system files to
recovery drive". This is kind of the whole point of having the recovery drive as opposed to
just the installation media. And my understanding is if you don't select this, then you're not going
to get that option to "recover from a USB drive" in the boot menu. Alright so after you click
next there, you're just going to have to wait. And I guess here, it's just kind of
collecting all the files that it's going to put onto it. And then it's going to
tell you the required size, depending on how much data it is. For mine, for example, it
said 16 GB and it kind of took a while to load it up. Then you have to select the flash
drive. Make sure you're choosing the correct one, and make sure it's blank, because everything on
it is going to be gone. And then you click create, and then wait. And this is probably going
to take a long time. For me, it actually took several hours and this could take longer if
it's USB 2.0, as opposed to 3.0. I don't know, but just be prepared to kind of wait for awhile.
But after it finishes, you're all done. It's good to go. And that's the easiest one of the four
that we're going to talk about for how to create. Next up we have the Windows 10 Installation
Media. This is going to involve downloading the ISO off of Microsoft's website and then
it'll have the tool to create it from there. So go to the "Download Windows 10" page
Microsoft's website. I'll put that link in the description. And then go down below where
it says, "Create Windows 10 Installation Media", and click download tool now. After it's all
downloaded, you run it and then wait a little bit of time for it to prepare. And then when you go to
the next thing, check, create installation media. And I would just keep all the defaults here,
unless you maybe want to change the language or you know that you want a different edition of
Windows 10, if it even gives you that option depending on your country or something. Just
keep it default in most cases and then go next. And then you select the USB drive and then make
sure that you pick the correct one again. And that it's blank, double check that. And then just
wait. It'll download the files necessary and then add it all to the drive and then it should be
good to go. All right, moving on to the Ubuntu Live USB. This one is going to take a little bit
more steps than the previous couple. Unfortunately they don't have a simple, easy to download
tool. You have to download a couple of things, but it's not too hard to follow the instructions.
They have a whole tutorial on their site. So what you do is go to the Ubuntu "Create a Bootable
USB Stick on Windows" page/tutorial, and I'll put that link in the description again. And then
as it says, you're going to first need to download a program called Rufus, which is going to
burn the ISO image of Ubuntu onto the drive. So download the Rufus program and then next
you're going to have to separately download the Ubuntu Desktop ISO file. And again, I'll put
that link in the description. On that page, you're going to see several different options.
I would just do the top one labeled LTS. LTS stands for long-term service. It just
means that it's going to be supportive without necessarily needing to be updated as often. And
it'll be supportive for a long time. After you have the Rufus tool and the ISO downloaded, just
follow the instructions on this tutorial. It's better laid out than what I would be able to
describe in this video. It's really simple from here though. You literally just make sure
the settings match as on the screenshots they have. You just make sure you select the ISO file
and then select the correct USB. And again, make sure all of the settings and stuff is checked the
same, and then just run it and it'll burn it to that USB and be good to go. Finally, how to create
the Hiren Boot CD PE USB. Kind of a mouthful I know, but it's actually a little bit easier even
than the Ubuntu one. So to do this, you go to the download page for the Hiren Boot CD. Again, link
in the description. And here it might be a little bit confusing. Actually you have to scroll all
the way down and then click on the ISO file name, and then download that. It's not really clear that
that's the download, but that's what it is. And that is the ISO image that's going to be burned
onto the USB, kind of like the same ISO that we had for a Ubuntu. And then you're going to next
go to the USB booting page. You can just click it here, but again, I'll put the link in the
description if you want. And then download the tool it has linked called "ISO2USB" and then run
it. And this one's a little bit simpler than Rufus so I'll just show you what to do. You simply
choose the Hiren ISO and then the USB device. Again, like everything, double check, go
into Windows Explorer and make sure this is the correct one, if it's all blank already.
And then you can choose a label name for it, and then click process and it'll go through
and create that USB. So at this point, all the drives should be fully bootable
and working. I would definitely recommend testing these out and making sure they work
before you're in crisis mode trying to figure out why your computer crashed and you're trying
to get these to work. And then you realize you didn't do it right or something. And also to make
sure that you know how to boot to them. If you don't know how to boot to a USB device already, I
would definitely look that up for your computer. There's usually a different procedure,
depending on the model. For example, sometimes you press F10 while it's booting up.
Sometimes F2, F8 whatever. Look it up for your model. Make sure you know how to do that. So then
if something does ever happen to your computer, you'll now have a good idea of possibly
where you can start for troubleshooting, like running some of those tools, like the
recovery thing, the system restore points, or if you need to copy files off of you'll
now have a couple tools you can start from. Thanks again to Private Internet Access for
sponsoring this video. And again, be sure to go to that link in the description or right here
where you can get 77% off a two year plan. Now, if you guys want to keep watching, the next
video to recommend is where I was talking about how you can figure out about how much time
left your SSD has based on how much data has been written to it already, and the spec for
what it's rated for. So I go through all that right there. You can just click on. So thanks so
much for watching guys. I'll see you in the next.
