Boot from a USB drive

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You can crate a bootable USB drive that enables you to boot into Factory OS without having to flash a device's hard drive.

What you need

  • A Factory OS FFU
    • Ensure the FFU includes drivers to boot on the device or devices you're going to boot from the USB drive.on.
    • Use *.*.*.* as the DevicePlatformID
  • A USB 3.0 drive, 32GB or larger if using the default device layout.
  • A target device that you'll boot with the bootable USB drive
    • Must support UEFI booting
    • Must have Secure boot disabled

Create a bootable Factory OS USB drive

  1. Plug the USB drive into the PC you built the FFU on.

  2. Use diskpart to identify the physical drive number of the USB 3.0 drive:

    diskpart
list disk

  3. Flash the image to the USB drive. Use DISM to apply the FFU to the USB drive:

    From the WSK environment:

    dism /apply-ffu /imagefile:<Path to the FFU> /applydrive:\\.\PhysicalDriveX

    Where X is the drive number of the USB drive you want to flash.

Boot your device from USB

  1. Make sure your device is turned off.
  2. Plug the bootable USB drive you created into the device you want to boot.
  3. Turn on your device and use the UEFI menu to boot from the USB drive. The device should boot into Factory OS.