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.
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. |