Gordon said:
If it's a new machine then the odds are it WILL boot from a flash drive -
the point is (I think) that Windows won't allow booting from a flash
drive....
Interesting. I'll have to check that out. I don't even know offhand how to
get to the BIOS on my new machine. Fast startups have hidden the screen
that used to splash up saying press <key> to get to BIOS and different
systems have different buttons to push to get there (and the time window for
being able to press that key is typically very short).
Last I looked at a BIOS it only showed floppy/CD/HD. I wonder if the flash
drive has to be plugged in and recognized or if it would show USB port as a
boot option and attempt to detect anything connected to it whenever it
boots.
Bootable disks normally give you some kind of command prompt for executing
commands which won't work while the OS is running or for assisting in
recovering a broken OS. I can't imagine why you'd want to run Windows from
the (USB) flash drive. At best that would be painfully slow. If you want
to run the OS from an external device, the sata port might make more sense.
I hope that would work since I am planning to get an external hard drive as
soon as I get the cash, to make a copy of my internal hard drive, and I'd
want to be able to boot to it if my internal hard drive fails to boot.