No one is immune to a PC which refuses to start or that plants in a loop. And in this situation, it is good to have a USB key on hand with a “emergency kit” to solve the problem and recover data.
If most problems on a PC can be resolved directly from the operating system, some more serious dysfunctions just prevent the computer from starting properly and arriving to the office. In anticipation of this kind of situation, a good precaution to be taken is to have under the elbow a USB aid or repair key.
A USB troubleshooting or emergency key is a removable storage support, containing a portable operating system and a series of software tools that can be carried out without being installed on the computer. You can see it as a kind of mini-tindows operating from a USB key, with a graphical interface and diagnostic, repair and disinfection tools.
Please note that software on board these Troubleshooting USB keys can be detected, wrongly, such as malware by anti-virus. This comes from the fact that they can access important parameters of a computer, which is necessary for their troubleshooting mission. Do not worry, these tools are safe and have no risk for your data or your system.
To create this “digital emergency kit”, everything you need is a USB key with sufficient capacity, the software troubleshooting kit itself in the form of an ISO image, and a Torcivable USB key creation software like Rufus. We present below two programs of free USB USB key, among the best known and the most used.
HIREN’s BOOTCD PE First of all. Historical emergency kit, originally provided for CDs (as its name suggests), it works today on USB support and provides a Windows 11 troubleshooting environment. The kit has anti-virus, recovery utilities Disk data and management, and some system analysis tools. The whole weighs only 3.06 GB and therefore even holds on small USB keys.
USB medication Next. Another very popular troubleshooting kit, this time it contains several “live” operating systems (a mini-tindows, a Linux) and many diagnostic and repair tools. In addition, it allows you to add additional programs of your choice when creating the USB key. More complete, it is also much heavier than Hiren’s Bootcd PE and weighs no less than 21.8 GB. A substantial USB key is therefore necessary.
For each of these troubleshooting kits, you will find step-by-step instructions for the creation of the USB key with Rufus or Ventoy directly on developer sites. To use this emergency key in the event of a problem, you just have to insert it into one of the USB ports of your PC and start on it.
To do this, you will first need to access the BIOS or the UEFI of your computer, and define the USB key as a starter disk. The manipulation differs for each PC model, and you will find the procedure by performing a search for the type “PC + Bios / UEFI + Boot Order” type in a search engine.