Windows 10: Determine whether a usb drive is bootable

Short of rebooting, is there some way to tell whether a usb drive is bootable?

:)

 

how to determine whether a nokia phone is made from finland or china?

I don't know where my nokia phone is made from cause on the nokia phone box, it just said made by nokia. So, what does this mean? from finland or china? I also want to ask is there any difference between nokia phone made from finland and china? I search
the forum and they said there is no difference. So if there wasn't any difference why some people still insist on buying the nokia phone made from finland instead of china? So, i just want to confirm is there really no difference at all between nokia phone
made from finland and china?

 

how to determine whether a nokia phone is made from finland or china?

There is absolutely no difference whatsoever between a genuine Nokia phone made in Finland and one made in China.

The reason some people insist on buying Finnish-made Nokias rather than Chinese-made is for any or all of the following reasons:

* They don't know that there is no difference between them and assume that the Chinese-made product is inferior

* They don't accept that there is no difference between them

* Unscrupulous retailers charge a premium for Finnish-made phones claiming that they're better (we've recently seen the case of a retailer in Egypt, I think, sticking the product identification labels of N78s made in Finland onto N96s made in China and selling
the altered N96s $20 dearer than unaltered ones).

So, in answer to the question "how to determine whether a Nokia phone is made in Finland or in China", the answer is "look at the product identification label in the battery compartment, but it's irrelevant because they're identical anyway."

 

Not really. Some cheapie media thumb drives can't be made bootable.

If a good thumb drive was created with a legit bootable creation tool and has the normal resources on it, (usually 8 items), it should be bootable.

 

To be capable of being made bootable a usb stick has to use an mbr partition table. You may not realise it, but a usb doesn't actually need a partiton table, and many are supplied formatted without one. Such a usb has to be reformatted completely from scratch to give it an mbr in order to make it bootable. This is what the MCT does when it makes a bootable usb, you can also do it yourself with Diskpart.

Edwin has shown examples of the contents of a typical bootable usb from Microsoft. The folders boot and efi, and the files bootmgr and bootmgr.efi are essentials, the rest may vary depending on the purpose of the usb. A bootable Recovery Drive won't have a setup.exe or autorun.inf, for example.

In addition, to be bootable on a legacy bios system the partition has to be marked as Active. You can see if it is in Disk Management.

 

Thanks for reminding me about the MBR stuff, Bree. It had totally slipped my mind that active + MBR is what it takes to be bootable.
--Ed--

 

Remember, that's only required for a legacy bios system, a uefi system doesn't care if the partition is active or not - if the right files are there it will boot.

 

Yes, but it explains by it's there on a "generally bootable" UFD, suitable for both BIOS and UEFI platforms. So again: thanks, and thanks one more time for the additional explanation.
Best wishes,
--Ed--