HOW TO… Reinstall Windows using your Android phone
What you need: Android phone; Ventoy app; OTG cable; USB stick or external hard drive Time required: One hour
We’ve always recommended preparing a USB-based emergency toolkit, from which you can boot and reinstall Windows if your PC suffers a serious corruption. This isn’t an alternative to maintaining regular backups, but a supplement: reinstalling the operating system usually means you’ll lose everything on the drive your PC boots from. So, if you store important files there, they’ll disappear unless you have duplicates.
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.
But all is not lost if you have an Android phone or tablet. 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. You can then use that to
