Booting from a USB flash drive under Windows 8

I am in the process of fixing a Windows 8 laptop which won't boot. It appeared that the hard drive had errors, and I needed to boot from a flash drive to run some diagnostic software. On Windows 7 and earlier this is a simple process, however as I just found on Windows 8 it's a different story - the laptop refused to boot from the USB drive, which worked find on another non Windows 8 computer.

Eventually I found this article:
How to Set Windows 8 PC to Boot with Legacy BIOS Mode Instead of UEFI Mode

It details how to setup the BIOS so you can boot from flash drives like mine again.

 

Yea i expect MS is going to catch some heat in their new efforts to make this windows version more secure. Wait until windows 8 won't boot and the even a USB recovery stick fails to access the recovery partition just to do a simple REFRESH.

I about pulled my hair out when faced with this issue recently and had no image backup resource to turn to. After all it successfully done a REFRESH times before with no problems by simply rebooting into system repair from the active system.

However this time was different. I took a chance of making a recovery boot up disk with a DVD that finally worked flawlessly and allowed the system to REFRESH from it's recovery partition.

 

Thanks for the Article.