Bottom line: Flash drive booting is a temporary and relatively rare need.

That can be especially problematic if you ever need to restart your PC remotely and expect it to boot back into Windows so you can access it remotely again.

And if you ever accidentally leave a bootable flash drive connected, your system will boot into that environment when you may not have wanted that to happen. In terms of boot order, putting USB devices at the top of the boot order will just cause your system to take longer to boot each time - especially if you only have a generic “USB storage device” option. And on that subject, you didn’t actually answer the question of how they were currently formatted. You can always format them back to whatever file system they’re using right now. The sticks would have had to be formatted at some point, even if it was just at the factory, and there’s no need to be afraid of doing that yourself. And you mentioned that this new system is a Dell? If you bought a brand new Dell system with Windows pre-installed, I don’t see how it’s possible that it would have come with Legacy BIOS boot support enabled.Īs for formatting flash drives, even if you’ve never done that before, try doing it now. It’s a nice anti-rootkit mechanism, and it’s how all PCs sold with Windows are required to come out of the box these days, so it’s not like you would be implementing some unusual configuration. If you don’t have any need to boot Legacy BIOS environments because you’re not running Windows versions older than Win8 or similarly old Linux distros, then I would absolutely think of touching those settings to enable UEFI Secure Boot. It may have come set up to support both BIOS and UEFI booting, but in that case UEFI Secure Boot would be disabled.

Click to expand.If you have a brand new system, I don’t think it would have come set up for pure Legacy BIOS booting.

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