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Create Bootable Live USB Drives

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

With so many live operating systems available you have plenty of choices for

making bootable live USB drives. And to top it all, you have installation

CD/DVDs which you want to convert to USBs for either fast installation or for

installing to a device which doesn't have an optical drive. Also, with the

advent of netbooks the requirement of USB based installation media has grown

rapidly. However, the worst problem here is that most ways of creating such USB

drives are command line based. So, if you want to make a bootable installation

USB disk of the latest OS Windows 7, you need to run some commands to make sure

the USB drive is bootable. UNetbootin lets you create a bootable USB drive from

any bootable optical media or an ISO. The utility also takes care of the

download for Linux distros.

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The user interface of UNetbootin has over 40 Linux Live CDs listed along with

their multiple versions. All you need to do is to create a ootable USB drive

from any such distro is to select the name of the distro and its version from

the interface and then select the USB drive you want to write to. The tool does

the rest.

Direct Hit!

Applies To: Win & Linux users



Price: Free


USP: Learn how to create a USB drive from
any optical media or an ISO



Primary Link: http://unetbootin.so
urceforge.net/



Search Engine Keyword:


live USB drives, Unetbootin



If you don't have the ISO, from which you want to create the USB listed in

the utility or if it's a custom distro built by you or you want to create a

Microsoft OS installation USB disk, then all you have to do is to download or

acquire the ISO manually from the respective sources. You have to select the

second radio button on the utility which says Diskimage, and select the ISO from

the dropdown list next to the radio button. That's it. We tried building an

installation USB drive of Windows 7 and Fedora 11 using this utility and it

worked perfectly .

After selecting Live Distro for writing to a USB drive from

the drop down list, you have to select the desired version.
Once you select the distro and the version of the OS and hit

Ok button, the application will download the distro from the correct

location and write it to the USB and make it bootable.
From this option, you can browse and select the path of any

desired ISO image and use it to make your USB drive bootable. It works with

Windows ISOs as well.
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