We have all been there at one time another. We have a computer that needs reformatted but there’s a catch. Either the CD drive doesnt work very well, or at all, there are no burnable CD/DVDs to be found, or the computer just plain doesn’t have an optical drive at all. This is something that has the potential to throw a major kink in your project, and just really piss you off. Well there is a very simple solution that even the most computer illiterate can handle. This solution is called UNetbootin. This little handy tool has the potential to take any bootable CD image and transfer the image to a USB drive and make it bootable as well. Not only can you use CD images that you have, but it also has the ability to download images from their respective websites automatically and install them to the USB stick. Even better, it’s available for both Linux and Windows. The program creates a a Syslinux install on your USB stick, although it does not format the drive so you won’t lose the data that is already on the stick. It supports tons of linux distros such as Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, CentOS, Debian, Gentoo, Linux Mint, Arch Linux, Mandriva, Slackware as well as FreeDOS, FreeBSD and NetBSD although it is not limited to the ones on this list. It also has the ability to load utilities such as Ophcrack, BackTrack, Gujin, GParted and many more. I stuck the link below that leads to the Unetbootin sourceforge page. The program is pretty self explanatory and has a Wizard that makes it pretty much impossible to get lost so I don’t think any guide is necessary.
http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/
Oh…and I take no credit for this program. I am just using this to inform you as to how cool this useful little program is.