I'm dealing with a frustrating issue. My laptop's hard drive has a corrupted operating system after an interrupted reset. My cousin unplugged it while I was resetting, and now I'm stuck in a boot loop without being able to access safe mode. I need to format the hard drive and reinstall Windows, but I'm wondering if I can do that without a bootable USB drive. Also, would Windows 11 run on a Lenovo Ideapad with an i3 7th gen processor and 12GB of RAM?
2 Answers
Technically, you can reinstall Windows without a bootable USB, but if you want to save time and avoid digging into complicated methods, I suggest just picking up a cheap USB drive. You can create a Windows installer on it using another computer. If you have an SD card and a reader, that could work too, just remember it will get wiped!
As for running Windows 11 on your Lenovo Ideapad with a 7th gen i3, usually, the installer won’t allow it because of the CPU requirement. However, you can modify the installer to bypass this restriction, and if Windows 10 worked fine on your setup, Windows 11 should too!
If you don't have access to another computer, you could buy a USB stick that has USB-C or use a dongle/OTG adapter. There’s software like EtchDroid available for writing ISOs to sticks right from your phone, though be careful of scams in the Play Store.