A technician is installing an upgrade of Windows on a machine using an external drive. After rebooting the installation process hangs and reports the media cannot be found. Which of the following…

Selecting PXE as the first boot method would attempt to boot from the network rather than the external drive and would not resolve driver-related media access issues.

CPU speed settings in BIOS are unrelated to the operating system installer's ability to detect external storage media.

Windows setup operates in a minimal pre-installation environment (WinPE) that may not include drivers for all USB host controllers or external drive adapters, especially legacy or non-standard ones. Loading the appropriate third-party drivers via the 'Load Driver' option during setup provides WinPE access to the device, allowing the installation media to remain accessible throughout the process.

Resetting the system clock affects time-sensitive operations like certificate validation but has no bearing on storage device driver availability during OS installation.