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How to create bootable USB drives?

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CIOL Bureau
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BANGALORE, INDIA: 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.

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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.

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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.
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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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