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.

When users wish to list and manually choose from all available boot volumes, holding the options key down will display locally bootable volumes. Some users have noticed that this boot menu has started ...

Every Windows PC usually starts from the built-in hard drive, as the term “Windows PC” implies. This is because the Microsoft operating system is not anchored in or with the hardware, but is installed ...

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 ...