First of all, why w0uld you want to ever do this? Booting from a USB drive isn’t just something you’d do every day, unless somehow you actually had an operating system loaded up on it (TinyXP anyone?). No, doing this procedure is typically used if you’re having issues with your normal operating system and need to perform a “rescue,” also known as a recovery. Most of the time your recovery tools are going to be located in a CD or DVD given to you by your laptop manufacturer, but not always. Cheaper laptops generally come with a “recovery partition” (this is common with Compaq products), usually located on a separate partition from the C: drive. For example, my recovery partition on the laptop I’m sitting on right now is actually located on the D: drive, even though I only have one physical hard drive installed into this computer. The D: drive is just a simple partition created with software to keep the recovery data away from my main computer data.
Anyway, when you start your computer, you’ll usually see an option in the lower left corner telling you to use an “F” (“function”) key to boot into BIOS instead. BIOS is going to help you boot a USB drive by allowing you to change the boot order of different peripherals. Generally it’ll be in the order of: DVD/CD drive, then hard drive, then any other drive. This default setting is to allow you to boot a rescue CD first, but since we’re not going to do that today, we need to simply change it so the USB drive boots first. There should be on-screen instructions as to how to actually change the USB boot sequence using your keyboard. Once that’s done, simply save the settings, pop in your USB drive, and restart.
When you boot back up, your USB drive will be booted first, allowing you to use your rescue tools. Voila!
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