For a long time, Microsoft didn’t sell Windows install media in the form of bootable USB flash drives. Instead, it prefered to stick to old-school DVD media, despite the fact that many notebooks today ...

A bootable Mac OS X thumb drive comes in handy when you need to troubleshoot OS issues for yourself, your family, or your friends. It’s also extremely useful for keeping your basic setup consistent ...

We all need to start from scratch sometimes and if you're building a new PC, chances are you'll need to learn how to make a bootable USB drive. This will enable you to boot your PC directly from a USB ...

Margaret T. wants to boot from a flash drive and work on documents from there. You’ll need to get an operating system onto the flash drive. You’ve got a number of ...

Rufus is a free, portable utility that creates bootable USB flash drives from ISO files. As of 2026, the latest version is Rufus 4.13 — and it’s faster and more capable than ever, with built-in ...

Update: Before you try all of this, you may want to try using WinToFlash, a utility designed to create a bootable Windows flash drive for Windows XP/Vista/7/Server. If this works for you, you can skip ...

Now that Apple has released OS X 10.9 Mavericks, you might want to consider creating a USB install drive for clean installs and future use. Ed Rhee Ed Rhee, a freelance writer based in the San ...

Windows 8 has the ability to create a bootable USB flash recovery drive that can be used to troubleshoot a Windows 8 computer that is unable to start. A recovery drive is the same as a startup repair ...

Making a bootable macOS Big Sur USB drive is a quick and clean way to install a fresh copy of macOS on your Mac. This hands-on tutorial is valid for both the public and developer beta versions of ...

Apple only sells OS X Mountain Lion as a digital download in the Mac App Store. The installer weighs in at a hefty 4.05GB, but the good news is that you can install your copy of Mountain Lion on all ...

Creating a bootable Windows USB drive used to be a chore, but today, one solution can pretty-well suit most people. However, there are times when a flash drive has some quirk that prevents it from ...

Jesus Vigo goes over the steps to create a bootable USB to install OS X 10.9 (aka Mavericks). In April, I wrote an article on TechRepublic about how to create a bootable USB to install OS X. The ...