When you use Hasleo WinToUSB to create bootable Windows USB drive (Windows To Go USB drive, Windows installation USB drive or bootable WinPE USB drive), you can select a partitioning scheme to allow Hasleo WinToUSB to automatically format the destination USB drive. In some cases, however, you may want to use a special partition layout scheme to suit your situation, in which case you need to manually prepare the partitions on the destination USB drive. This user guide focuses on how to manually prepare partitions on the destination USB drive when using Hasleo WinToUSB to create bootable Windows USB drive, so please read this guide carefully before creating bootable Windows USB drive.
How to manually prepare partitions when using Hasleo WinToUSB to create bootable Windows USB drive?
- Booting both BIOS-based and UEFI-based computers (Recommended): Please convert the USB drive to MBR partition scheme and create the system and boot partitions. The system partition must be FAT32 format and the boot partition must be NTFS format.
- Booting BIOS-based computers: Please convert the USB drive to MBR partition scheme and create the system and boot partitions. The system partition can be FAT32 or NTFS format and the boot partition must be NTFS format. The system partition and boot partition can be the same partition.
- Booting UEFI-based computers: Please convert the USB drive to GPT partition scheme and create the EFI system partition (ESP) and boot partition. The EFI system partition must be FAT32 format and the boot partition must be NTFS format.
Tips:
- Both the system and boot partition must be primary partition, and we recommend using Windows built-in Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc) to partition and format the disk. If you use a third-party partitioning tool to format the partitions, Windows may not boot properly.
- The destination boot partition must be a NTFS partition and at least 14 GB. Please note that the actual required partition size is related to the Windows operating system that you want to install or clone. The destination boot partition must be 20% larger than the used space on source boot partition when cloning Windows to a USB drive.
- The destination system partition must be a NTFS/FAT32 partition. If the destination system partition is a FAT32 partition, then it must be greater than or equal to 40 MB and less than or equal to 32 GB. (The recommended size is 500 MB.)
- If you have formatted the wrong USB drive, you can use our Free Data Recovery Software Hasleo Data Recovery to recover your lost files.
