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,
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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.