To Powerwash your Chromebook, click on your profile picture in the lower right-hand corner and navigate to Settings > Advanced > Reset > Powerwash. Use Win32 Image Writer, then select the IMG file and select the USB device from the menu. It's similar to the new Reset and Refresh functionality in Windows 10. Chromium OS Use 7zip to extract IMG file from the downloaded file. It'll delete locally stored user data and restore the Chromebook back to its factory state, but it won't reinstall the operating system. To install Chrome OS Flex, you’ll need a USB drive to create a bootable device, with a capacity of at least 8GB. The Powerwash is akin to hitting a factory reset button. Although Google does not officially provide Chrome OS to be installed on other computers, you can in fact do it through other ways: either downloading and installing Chromium OS (the open sourced version of Chrome OS), or using Neverware ‘s ( acquired by Google recently) CloudReady Chrome OS. Try a Powerwashīefore taking the drastic step of reinstalling the entire operating system, why not first see if the Powerwash feature can remedy the problem? In any of these cases, you might need to completely reinstall the operating system. Perhaps you tried installing Linux and something went awry, maybe you went poking around in the Developer Mode and made an irreversible change, or perhaps you got unlucky and downloaded a Canary Build that crashed the system. More often than not, the cause can be traced back to the user.

That said, things do still occasionally go wrong.

Install chrome os on usb