A perfectly written USB does nothing sitting in a drawer. This page covers the last metre of the job — getting the dead PC to actually start from it — including the boot menu keys, the right entry to pick, and what Secure Boot will and will not object to.
Most "the USB does not work" reports are really "the PC never tried to boot from it". PCs start from their internal drive by habit; you have to interrupt that habit in the first seconds after power-on. The tool for that is the one-time boot menu — safer than changing BIOS settings, because it changes nothing permanently. Combine it with the right entry choice and a clear head about Secure Boot, and a phone-made USB boots exactly like a PC-made one, because to the PC there is no difference at all.
If no boot menu exists or the key does nothing, enter setup with Del or F2 and use its boot section — but prefer the menu whenever it exists.
The same USB can appear twice in the menu — once plainly, once with UEFI in front of its name. On any modern PC, choose the UEFI entry: Windows 11 requires the UEFI path, and modern installers expect it. The plain entry is the legacy mode, kept for old hardware and old images. Choosing legacy for a modern installer is a classic cause of "Windows cannot be installed to this disk" errors later, because the installer then wants a different disk layout than the machine uses. When only one entry appears, use it — the PC has already decided for you.
Secure Boot checks that boot software is signed by a trusted maker. By that rule: official Windows and Ubuntu images boot cleanly, whether written directly or carried by Ventoy, because Microsoft's and Canonical's signatures are trusted by every PC. A Ventoy drive itself starts through Ventoy's own loader, which some PCs accept directly and others challenge: Ventoy then shows an on-screen enrolment flow — a one-time step that registers Ventoy's key with the PC's Secure Boot (the MokManager screens) — after which it boots normally forever on that machine. If enrolment is blocked or the BIOS is locked by an administrator password, the honest options are a directly written official image (signed, no enrolment) or Secure Boot switched off by whoever owns that password. Nothing here is a defect in your phone-made USB; a PC-made Ventoy drive behaves identically.
Success is unmistakable: the Windows installer asks for language and offers Install or Repair, the Linux image shows its menu, or the rescue environment opens its desktop. At that fork, decide what the emergency actually is. Data trapped on a non-booting Windows? Boot a rescue or Linux image first and copy the data out before any install touches the disk. Windows broken but data safe or backed up? Go to the installer's Repair options first, and reinstall only if repair fails. The USB you made is a door, not a decision — walk through it with the data question answered first.
The end of the video is the proof — the dead PC starting from the phone-made USB. Keep this page open at that moment and match the screens.
▶️ Watch Full VideoTry entering setup with Del or F2 and look for the boot section or a boot-menu option there. Some laptops hide the function keys behind the Fn key. And tap earlier and faster — the key must land during the first seconds, before the Windows logo would normally appear.
For a one-off repair, no — the one-time menu does the job and leaves the machine exactly as it was. Permanent order changes are for a machine you boot from USB regularly. Changing settings you do not need is how a repair gains a second problem.
Almost certainly not — that is the Secure Boot key enrolment described on this page. Follow Ventoy's on-screen enrolment steps once for that PC. If the screens are blocked by an admin-locked BIOS, use a directly written official Windows or Ubuntu image instead, which needs no enrolment.