If you boot to this drive, you can also use it to perform a clean install of Windows 10 on your PC by running setup.exe from the drive’s root folder. Either way, as long as you’ve got the USB drive plugged into a USB port as the system restarts, you will then be able to boot from that device into WinRE. If you click through Start 🡪 Settings 🡪 Update & Security 🡪 Recovery 🡪 Advanced Startup 🡪 Restart Now, your PC will restart immediately and offer the Recovery environment as an option upon start-up. If you can boot into Windows, you can force your PC to boot off the USB drive on restart. If I take that route, I must then strike the F12 function key to get to an alternate boot menu. On my newer Lenovo PCs, the BIOS tells me that striking the proverbial “any” key will interrupt initial boot-up. Booting Your Windows 10 Install USBĪs a Windows PC is booting, you may be able to interrupt the boot sequence before the Windows loader gets going by striking a function or special key on that machine.

Now, you’ve got a brand-new, ready-to-use bootable USB flash drive with Windows 10 21H1 (or whatever version is current as you read this).

The process concludes with a brief cleanup to get rid of temporary files and other detritus. When the MCT writes the bootable files to the drive, it tells you it’s ready.