Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years. TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust. Although creating a bootable USB flash drive isn't exactly rocket science, the setup process can ...

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 ...

Windows 11's Insider Preview builds keep coming fast and furious. Just a couple of weeks ago, the next version of Windows made the shift from developer builds into beta, indicating that Microsoft ...

If you often create bootable USB drives using third-party software on Windows, you might need to format it first. However, you can use Ventoy2Disk, which is a free tool to create a bootable USB drive ...

Passcape ISO Burner is free portable software for Windows that lets you easily burn ISO image files to CD/DVD/USB. It also lets you create bootable disks or a bootable USB drive from the ISO images ...

For years all I have had to do is... dd if=WinX.iso of=/dev/sdY Done. No fancy applications, no special switches. Just straight dd gets it done. Now I've got 3 motherboards that will not boot with an ...

I'm not a big fan of optical drives, and haven't had one in my system for quite sometime now (probably around the time Windows Vista was released). How do you install Windows if you don't have an ...

If you’ve been wanting to try Linux, whether because you’re worried about privacy in Windows 10, don’t like Microsoft’s “ignore what users want” approach or want to stay out of Apple’s walled garden, ...

If you have to create a bootable USB media to perform a clean installation or an in-place upgrade of Windows 11, you usually have to use the Microsoft Media Creation Tool. Although the tool works as ...

The "Bootable" legacy ISO you've used is in fact not bootable, it relies on CDROM emulation provided by BIOS. VMs don't usually do this sort of emulation. If you set the guest OS to something like ...