Question Booting Modern Computers from USB

[timswim78]

Been out of the PC support game for a while. So, please forgive my ignorance.

My family has a couple of relatively modern PCs (a Dell XPS 8940 Desktop and Dell Inspiron 14-7425 Laptop). I want to boot each of them from a USB drive to do a clean install of Windows 11. In each case, I have completely failed at doing this. I have used the Windows Media Creation Tool to build USB installation drives, which work just fine on other computers. However, the two Dell machines will not boot from these drives. I press F12 to get into the boot menu, select the appropriate USB drive, and then the system never boots.

These machines have UEFI, which are different from the BIOS that I had supported in the past. I am guessing that I have some UEFI settings wrong, and I have tried changing every setting that I can think of. Yet, I am still unable to boot from USB drives on either of these machines. I appreciate any insights that you might have.

 

[Tech Junky]

First off you have to use gpt for the drive to work with uefi. MBR will mess things up.

I've taken a liking to using ventoy as of late for a couple of reasons. First you just create the drive and then drop the iso into the folder and can do this with multiple os images instead of formatting each time with Rufus.

The MCT isn't always the best option. It's good for grabbing the iso though.

 

[OlyAR15]

I've done clean installs of Win11 on my two Dells: 3090 Ultra and 7090 Ultra. I had no issues other than having to switch the Disk format from RAID to AHCI. Otherwise, I don't recall doing anything different from my other computers. I just set the boot order to boot first from USB in the UEFI.

The MCT isn't always the best option.

I disagree. I've never had an issue with using the MCT to create a bootable USB device. IMO it is the most idiot-proof way of doing it, rather than using Rufus or one of the other 3rd-party tools.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Some dell PCs will only boot "dell windows" installers, and not the generic "Microsoft Windows" installers.

Try getting a hold of a "Dell Windows Reinstallation" DVD for the edition of Windows that you have.

Maybe disable Secure Boot, and try it that way, too.