Make a Bootable External Hard Drive for Windows 10/8/7 without Losing Data

Download Media Creation Tool from Microsoft's official website. Then run it on your own PC. 2. Prepare an external hard drive (or USB) with a capacity of 8GB or more. 3. Download and install Windows ADK (Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit) if necessary. 4. Launch Media Creation Tool and connect the drive to your computer.

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Articles Computer Make Bootable External Hard Drive for Windows without Losing Data

Make a Bootable External Hard Drive for Windows 10/8/7 without Losing Data

Updated: January 17, 2024By Selena Hernandez

make bootable

To boot PC from an external hard drive, you need to make the hard drive bootable firstly. A normal external hard disk without any boot files cannot be recognized by the BIOS. So the first thing we have to do is make a boot disk. Here you will run three options to make an bootable external hard drive.

Contents:: Part 1: How to Make an Bootable External Drive - 3 Options; Part 2: How to Boot Computer from External Hard Drive

Part 1: How to Make an Bootable External Drive - 4 Options

Option-1: Create a bootable disk with Media Creation Tool

Windows media creation tool

Using this Media Creation Tool, you can directly choose the external hard drive (or DVD, USB flash drive) to create your own bootable media, which is more for installing or reinstalling Windows OS (Applies to: Windows 10, Windows 8.1, and Windows 7).

Preparation:

1. Download Media Creation Tool from Microsoft's official website. Then run it on your own PC.
2. Prepare an external hard drive (or USB) with a capacity of 8GB or more.
3. Download and install Windows ADK (Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit) if necessary.
4. Launch Media Creation Tool and connect the drive to your computer.
5. Referring to the detailed steps of how to create Windows 10 bootable drive with Media Creation Tool.

Option-2: Use Command Prompt to make bootable hard drive

Using Command Prompt (CMD) to make a bootable external hard drive is similar to using Media Creation Tool or other third-party tools. But the advantage of this method is that it is simple and pure, without bundled software.

1. Run Command Prompt as Administrator.
2. Connect your external hard drive to PC.
3. Execute the following commands showed in the picture one by one.
4. Then extract Windows ISO image file to this bootable hard drive whenever you want.

make a bootable external hard disk by cmd

Option-3: Create bootable external hard drive by Cocosenor Backup Tuner

Cocosenor Backup Tuner can absolutely make a bootable external hard drive for you through copying your current operating system to external hard drive partition. With all files of the PC's OS inside, an external hard drive can be bootable definitely.

1. Download and install Cocosenor Backup Tuner from official website.
2. Connect your external hard drive to the computer and initialize it.
3. Allocate a new partition for save the copy of the system OS.
4. Launch Cocosenor Backup Tuner, and select "Copy" tab in the user interface.
5. Find your current system disk partition (C drive), select it as the source partition and then choose your external hard drive partition to be the destination partition.
6. Click the "Start" button. Then, you just wait for the end of the process.

cocosenor backup tuner copy function

Option 4—Make Windows 10 bootable external hard drive via Cocosenor OS2Tuner

Cocosenor OS2Tuner is the powerful Windows bootable drive creator which can help you to burn the Windows 10 OS to the external hard drive in PE mode. But you need to connect the external hard drive with the computer via the USB-to-SATA adapter.