Starting your Surface from a USB drive can be useful if you want to change firmware settings or Windows startup settings or if your Surface device does not turn on, start, boot, or wake from sleep.

N.B.: Some laptops allow you to set the boot devices using a Windows application. Toshiba, for example, does this with some of their laptops. The application is either a standalone application or an ...

If you have multiple operating systems installed on your computer, or if you are trying to boot off various utility or other boot disks, you may run into problems where using an alternative or desired ...

Connecting an external hard drive to a computer before turning on the system can confuse the device when loading the operating system. When a computer hangs after the BIOS splash screen while being ...

If during installation, you receive an error message The selected boot device failed, Press <Enter> to Continue then know that this error can occur when you use a USB ...

Richard Purdy’s PC won’t boot when he has a flash drive plugged into it. That happens to me all the time. Here’s the problem: All PCs have a configurable boot order list. They try to boot from the ...

Want to try or install a Linux distribution (distro) on your computer? Making a bootable flash drive with an image of the distro is the simplest route these days. I've done it dozens of times, and ...

The USB flash drive has replaced the floppy disk drive as the best storage medium for transferring files, but it also has its uses as a replacement for CDs and DVDs. USB drives tend to be higher in ...

I have recently come across a problem on my Windows 7 laptop. The computer will not boot if I have any USB devices plugged in, no matter what they are or which port I use. I get a grey screen with the ...