If you’re tempted to skip the cable and just buy a USB stick with a plug that matches the port on your phone, bear in mind that you’ll also need to be able to plug it into your PC. The picture above shows our OTG cable connecting a USB stick with a full-size USB plug to the USB-C socket on our Google Pixel 5 phone. All your data will be left intact and, assuming the drive isn’t encrypted or corrupted beyond repair, you may be able to recover some files this way. Doing so will let you start your PC in Linux without touching the hard drive. So, if you’re confident working with anything other than Windows, there’s no reason why you can’t install a version of Linux on your stick, either instead of the Windows installation media, or alongside it.

We’ll be using software called Ventoy ( which lets you install multiple operating systems on the same stick (it supports around 750, including hundreds of Linux systems). You can then use that to boot your PC and may be able to reinstall the operating system, depending on the state of your hard drive. Here, we’ll show you how you can use it to make a bootable USB stick and copy across the Windows 10/11 installation files. The trouble is, without anticipating a system collapse and getting your toolkit ready, a breakdown of this kind will plunge you into a Catch-22 situation: you won’t be able to use your PC to compile the tools required to fix it.īut all is not lost if you have an Android phone or tablet. Download the Windows 10 installation file.Check whether your phone supports USB OTG.

Windows 11 installation media