4 USB Boot Drives EVERYONE Should Make! (Before It's Too Late)

Be prepared next time your computer collapses in on itself!

Links Mentioned in Video:

▼ Time Stamps: ▼
0:00 - Intro
0:44 - Hiren Boot PE
2:47 - Special Message
4:02 - Ubuntu Live USB
5:17 - Windows Install Media
6:40 - Windows Recovery Drive
9:46 - Requirements to Make
10:23 - Making: Recovery Drive
11:42 - Making: Install Media
12:33 - Making: Ubuntu Live USB
13:45 - Making: Hiren USB
14:39 - Final Thoughts

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[ThioJoe]

Thanks to Private Internet Access for sponsoring! As I said I've literally been a paying customer since 2014, it's great.

[Prithvidiamond]

ThioJoe, I must say that you have seriously redeemed yourself from being an active Youtube troll to being a teacher who teaches everyone who to be their own IT services guy. I really appreciate the change you have taken. Not a lot of people change for the better but you have, keep it up!

[octopusonfire]

A couple points about the Ubuntu live USB:

- Sometimes you can't mount a Windows drive in write mode because it is in some sort of hibernation state. You can bypass this by using the switch remove_hiberfile of the mount command.
- You can set up a persistent USB, which will save your Ubuntu configuration even if you shut down the machine. It's a little bit more complicated but easy to follow from any of the many tutorials you can find online.

[nerilancioni]

If you have a big enough USB drive, you can use Ventoy! It's a tool that makes your USB bootable from BIOS/UEFI and MBR/GPT partition tables (literally any PC) and you just drag the ISO files into it. When booting it displays a list of your ISOs and you can select wich one to run. Recommendation: Format the biggest partition with as exFAT to have files bigger than 2GB (I.E: Windows 10 ISO file)

[lforlight]

An Ubuntu drive is handy. One time I had a positioning program that has a boot manager feature built in. I only launched the program and it set the boot manager up, except it didn't actually function. When next I turned my laptop on, it showed me the program's logo and a blank boot menu. Basically locked out of my own computer, I contacted the company whose logo plagued my laptop. While dealing with the support, I remembered I have an Ubuntu CD, from the time back when Ubuntu would send you CDs for free. It let me bypass the faulty boot menu and access my files. I asked the support lady if this could help. She told me to delete a file or two, and that neutralized the rogue program.
Ubuntu live CD saved my laptop. Bootable USB drives are basically that.

[ThiagoHenriqueDS]

There's a tool called ventoy which allows you to have multiples ISOs images on a single USB drive and on boot you can select the one you want to boot from.

[NoEggu]

@11:26 "This is probably going to take a long time", meaning, creating the bootable USB drive. This is why:

Since you will be using the USB flash drive for this single purpose, most people will probably get an inexpensive flash drive, which makes sense.
But those inexpensive flash drives are inexpensive for a reason: "They are slow", especially when writing to them (when reading from them, they are usually not bad).

So creating your bootable flash drive will run as slow as 5 MB per second, even if it is a USB 3.0 flash drive (but it will read at more the 50 MB per second, or faster).

So, yes, save your money and get one of these inexpensive slow USB flash drives, because you will be writing a lot of data to it only once. When you need to boot from it, you should see acceptable speed.

And make sure that you do a test boot. Do not assume that just because it appears that you successfully created the bootable USB drive that it will actually boot.
Test it. Make sure it actually works.

Also, it is easy to create the bootable USB flash drive. But your system might not allow you to boot from that USB flash drive, even though the flash drive is perfect in every way. Why?
A lot of computers have a setting in the BIOS that locks out booting from external drives. So figure this out now, and do not wait until you actually need to boot from your flash drive.

You need to know:
-- Which keys to press, to get into your computer's BIOS (and once there, where to find the setting that will allow you to boot from your flash drive).
-- Which keys to press, to get your computer to actually boot from the USB flash drive.

@13:14 "LTS" does not stand for Long Term Service.
It stands for Long Term Stable.

Other versions might be available, which have frequent updates, and those updates have not been field tested for a lengthy period of time, which is why they are not deemed to be "Stable". They might be stable. But without the community using it for some time, it would be wrong to conclude that it is stable.


Cheers!

[johnszatkowski]

An absolute MUST! I use a free disk imaging software that makes in image of my main drive every week and stores it to a secondary drive. My computer just recently became "unstable" so I booted off a USB prepped thumb drive and restored my system from 7days prior and works like a champ! I also backup my critical data to a NAS every hour so I really lost nothing and had to do a little bit of tinkering with NO major loss! An hour of lost data is nothing compared to MONTHS (or more) and your system setup. I learned that the "hard way" and had almost TOTAL data loss! Since then I have safeguards in place to prevent that from happening and only took less than an hour of my time to setup to be well covered. You really need a NAS (Networked Attached Storage drive) to safeguard yourself doing backups frequently - in my case every hour. Most people don't plan for "total failure" until it happens. I was there too once but not anymore. Windows 10 offers a "back-up" to a NAS to do every hour and backup your stuff but a total image of the disk will restore you in a pinch and then you can copy the backups from your NAS back to your system.

[ggme]

Wow. oh Wow. This is probably one of the most clear-cut, perfect educational videos I've ever seen.
To the point. Perfect voice and clarity. NO SILLY MUSIC!!!.
You are a master of this. I need 3 of these drives which I will very soon create. Thank you Sir!

And I just subscribed.

[BWGPEI]

I go back to days of actually having Hiren's on a boot CD. Yet you put this all together so well that I get enthusiastic all over again. I had a Ubuntu boot USB in my pocket for serious social occasions, but having Hiren's as well is a real blessing. Thank You!

[UltralifeTech]

I’m also here to mention Ventoy. I have ~20 isos ready to go.

[armedrepublic]

I use Ventoy and load all of my boot fix tools along with every os iso to do installs as well. I have about 40 iso's on it. Way easier than keeping track of 4 drives

[PoeLemic]

Everyone ... it's good to listen to ThioJoe and be prepared.
ThioJoe ... Thanks for covering this. Yes, each update of Windows is bound to screw something up. Mine's screwed up right now. So, I'm planning to reinstall full when 21H1 comes out.

[kensmith]

You missed out the Puppy Linux option. This one is different from other Linuxes because it will save all your work into a compressed file on the hard drive or on the USB.
In the hard drive case, as far as Windows is concerned, it is just some binary file on your computer.
This means you can have a bootable and usable system that doesn't forget everything each time you reboot.
It is also very compact and extremely fast for most of what you need to do. Its design was focused on ease of use for being your "daily driver" OS but it does have gparted and the ability to access your NTFS partition if you tell it to do so.

[mario-bjornpeikert]

@ThioJoe: Did you ever consider checking out tools like Ventoy? These tools are easy to use multibooters which can run multiple images off one USB-Drive. I found out most systems built after 2009 or so run quite well with it.
Be aware: Some systems don't support USB booting if the drive partition exceeds 128 GB. If you can cope with this harsh limit, the Ventoy project would be my first choice for trying out.
Especially the feature to drag and drop iso images to the USB drive and having them listed automatically works out really nice!

[TallinuTV]

A little piece of software called Ventoy is really useful for stacking multiple separate boot media on a single USB flash drive. Then you just need one or two flash drives big enough to contain all your tools and install media. Though you should verify that anything you put on it actually boots up properly before relying on it.

[ElPutihernandez]

Hello teacher, I just wanted to tell you that every day I learn more about you and for me you are a teacher

[BM-izii]

NVMe's are not considered as 'drives' in certain UEFI's, but rather as some kind of miscellaneous hardware. They even use different menus to access them, if for example you want to change their boot order. That is probably the reason why there is no option in the Recovery Driver that works for them.

[Kumakaree]

Seriously I love the direction this channel has taken
You have my utmost respect Thio

[NerdPorkArsonist]

I wanted to mention that Linux's filesystem drivers for Windows filesystems (NTFS included) can be more stable when a drive is failing. If a drive is not mounting in windows and is nearing death, I highly recommend trying to mount it in Linux like the Ubuntu live mentioned in the video. I have been able to recover data off a drive before it fully died using this quick tip. Just be careful to only copy what you need first.... If a drive is not mounting it could be on its last leg.