Boot that ISO!
I hate to break the news to those of you with spindles filled with hundreds of blanks CD’s, but optical disc is dead! While this statement may be a bit dramatic, it holds true for me. Sure discs are still a means of cheap retail content delivery (Software, movies, etc), but for a network administrator even rewritable discs are a hassle.
The advent of the live CD has changed the game of even further. Once upon a time you might need one CD for every task that you might want to complete. Now you are able to cook your own live CD complete with all of the tools you need. Even with this ability, I recognize that there are some great live CDs out there that have a very complete set of network tools out of the box. I will discuss a few tools that make it much easier to take a typical ISO and “burn” it to a bootable USB drive.
Requirements
Before starting, keep in mind that in order for this entire process to work, the computer you intend to use the bootable USB drive with must support booting from such a device. Many older computers do not support this function. In some cases a BIOS upgrade may provide this functionality.
UNetbootin
UNetbootin is a utility for Windows and Linux that can take just about any ISO and write it to a USB drive in a bootable fashion. It has a nice feature where will can even automatically download the ISO for various Linux distributions before writing it to your USB drive.
Most users will use the second option, which will write an existing disk image (ISO or floppy/hard drive format) to the selected USB device.
I have personally used UNetbootin with many different ISOs and I have not run into any problems. This utility comes in handy for OS installs without a CD or otherwise using a live CD.
BootMyISOs
This is a Windows only utility used to make a USB drive bootable. Once BootMyISOs has done its part, all you have to do is copy the ISOs you want to the USB drive. This is great for replacing all of your old CDs with one bootable USB drive.
Make sure you refer to the linked page on Pen Drive Linux, since BootMyISOs only supports certain distributions/ISOs.
Happy booting!