How to Boot from your
USB External Hard Drive

It's possible to have your computer boot from a USB external hard drive. Bootable USB devices are useful for doing a system recovery. If you've ever been in the situation where you couldn't boot from the internal PC hard drive, you will appreciate having an external hard drive to use as a rescue disk. The external hard drive should have various disk and file rescue utilities such a virus removal program, a file recovery program, and a disk bad block fixer.

Booting from any USB device requires BIOS support. I'd like to say that all newer-computers support booting from a USB drive, but there always seems to be an exception to everything. Furthermore, every manufacturer has their unique way of getting to the boot menu. Dell uses the F12 key and HP uses the F9 key to enter the boot menu. Once you get into the boot menu, you need find the section that orders the boot devices. To boot through the USB, you will want to set the BIOS such that any USB device will boot before the internal hard drive. This way, if you don't have your bootable USB disk powered, the computer will boot from the internal hard drive instead.

Three Distinct Options to Boot a USB External Hard Drive

Once you've determined that your computer can boot from a USB external hard drive, you will need and operating system to boot with. Most portable boot media uses some from of free operating system such a free-DOS or a free Unix such as Linux or free BSD. It is also possible to put a limited form of Windows on an external hard drive. Three external boot options that I've tried are FlashBoot, BartPE, and GRML.

FlashBoot is the easiest product available to build an external boot disk. They provide a free demo version that can test before you pay for the program. FlashBoot can load many different operating systems but the program can also use FreeDOS, which has no additional licensing fees. If you have limited computer experience, this is the way to go.

BartPE is a free tool that uses a properly licensed copy of the Windows to build the boot disk. Microsoft does not support this tool. The nice part of this boot kit that is that it gives your rescue disk a graphical user interface. This tool requires an intermediate level of computer skills.

GRML is a slimmed down version of Linux that works well with external disks that need to run on different systems. The typical Linux installation, once it has been configured for a hard disk, doesn't work on a system with a different configuration. However, GRML is designed to make a hard drive installation act like a Linux installation CD that can auto-detect different types of hardware.

The Future of Bootable USB Drives

External hard drives are starting to be used as a next generation rescue platform. A hard drive has so much more room than a flash drive. The next step is to use bootable usb external hard drive as a portable desktop.

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