Booting from a USB stick is very helpful for many purposes. However, many factors have to be right for the boot to work ...

Starting your Surface from a USB drive can be useful if you want to change firmware settings or Windows startup settings or if your Surface device does not turn on, start, boot, or wake from sleep.

I did a clean install of XP at work. Had a ZIP and CD ROM in the system as well. For some reason the installer made the boot drive E:, so instead of a C: drive, I have an E: drive. Computer Management ...