Question Win 10 laptop, can boot from ext CD drive system repair disc ?

tausifs

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Hi ,

I recently bought a new Lenovo 320S laptop that is running Windows 10. It has no CD drive.

I use Windows 7 on a different laptop and routinely used to make backup system images using the Windows backup tool. This needed the creation of a system repair CD which I would insert into the built in drive and on start up you would have to interrupt Windows to make it boot from the CD drive and then you could make it re-image the disc from a system image backup on an external HDD.

I am new to Windows 10 and while I have found the “create system image (Windows 7)” back up option ... and have actually created a system image to an external drive , I would need to be able to make the new laptop boot from a CD drive. It doesn’t have one built in. So would this be impossible to do , even if I get an external CD drive ?

When I go to the option to “create a system repair disc” , it says “the system repair disc could not be created , Windows did not find a CD/DVD burner, make sure it is connected to the computer and try again”.

But I am doubtful that this would work as a boot option. Don’t the boot options have to be specified in the BIOS ? Sorry I am not very informed about this stuff. So if it not in the BIOS , then it could never be a boot option ?

I would be grateful if someone could enlighten me please. Thanks.
 
Last edited:
The BIOS/UEFI software does need to support booting from a USB optical drive, but many do.

There are plenty of other system imaging applications though, some of which will boot from a USB stick. You may want to look into those rather than buying an external DVD drive.
 
Have a look at Macrium Reflect (free). This app will create a system image (in a bespoke format) and comes with a bootable version of windows, just sufficient to run the app and perform a restore. You can put all of this onto a USB stick or SD card of suitable size (depends on your HDD contents) or, better still, onto an external HDD.

In terms of BIOS settings, you can usually get in there and change the priority so that IF there is a bootable drive present (say) on a USB port, it will use that first.
 

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