How to backup all of your data using a USB drive? Is it even possible? The answer is yes. Even though the majority of personal computers come with hard drives built-in, most people don’t realize that you can use a USB drive.
You can put the data on the computer and then plug the drive into an available USB port on your laptop or desktop. It will work just like any other drive.
So, how do you use a USB drive and boot up Windows Vista? In order to do this, you will need to use a special driver for your device. You can download the file called USB Flash Drive Drivers from the manufacturer’s website.
Once you have downloaded the file, it’s time to plug in your USB drive and turn on your PC or laptop. Your computer will now look for a boot device. This is a special device within your machine that acts as if it has a regular hard drive installed on it.
After your PC or laptop boots up, you will see a series of three lights. These are used to show you which device is booting up. When you see the light indicating that Windows is booting, you can safely remove the USB drive. It will not damage your computer or flash drive.
If you did, though, you will need to re-insert it before continuing. You might be wondering why you would want to use USB 2.0 ports. Well, because the older style of hard drives was fairly slow when it came to accessing files.
Even though it is more expensive, you will find that USB 2.0 drives are actually faster than their older brother. Although they are more expensive, it is worth it to buy the newer technology. In the future, there will be new developments for USB drives so you might not need to worry about this issue.
If you are using a USB port for your computer, you will have to go into the BIOS to set it so that you can boot from USB devices instead of hard drives. Sometimes this can be easily done, but sometimes you need to replace the existing BIOS with the latest and greatest.
The good news is that almost all current BIOS versions can boot up from USB drives. The only thing that may be required is that you press enter when you want to enter the BIOS. Having a USB drive on your laptop or desktop is going to make life easier.
You can carry two operating systems on one drive, instead of using two different machines. Instead of having to take the extra step of installing the second operating system on the new machine, you can just install the first one on the second machine. We highly recommend this device to backup photos more safely.
Then, install the new operating system, copy over your personal data, and boot up into the new machine. While it is possible to boot up using the floppy disk or installation CD that came with your windows machine, it is much easier to boot up from a USB.
Keep in mind that many operating systems such as Linux cannot boot up from USBs. Also, if you are using Linux, you should not install devices that are not part of the Linux package. This includes DVD drives and other devices that will make your computer less functional when it does boot up.
If you did everything right, your new drive should boot up. If it doesn’t boot up on its own, follow the next two simple steps to correct a USB drive that does not boot.
The first thing that you will want to do is boot up the recovery partition. This will allow you to see what happened to the rest of the machine. If you damaged anything, you will want to erase all files on the hard drive, including the operating system.