Create Bootable USB Flash Drive Tools

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By today's standards, CDs and even DVDs are cumbersome to work with. They have to be handled with care, they are typically write once media (I'm not a fan of the re-writable variety), and I actually work on a number of machines that don't have disc drives.

USB flash drives are popular and ever increasing in capacity. Best part is, it's relatively easy to find older ones that aren't big enough for some person's specific taste, but large enough for some powerful recovery and support tools.

I have several I keep close at hand around the shop with the following tools in decreasing size:
I'll go over why these specific tools at some point, but I use to keep these tools close at hand on CDs and DVDs (knoppix). I was constantly re-burning them to keep the images up to date and finding myself frustrated on a few machines without CD-roms having to pull out a USB based CD-rom.

I had loaded the tools to USB manually, trying to get everything to work with the latest version of syslinux with embedded versions of the tool, but it was a pain and even more complicated to keep up to date.

Universal USB Installer

Well apparently I wasn't alone. These guys over at pendrivelinux.com came up with a tool to make the process dirt simple: Universal USB Installer.

 

With this tool
  1. Decide which tool out of their relatively expansive list you want to make into a flash drive
  2. Download the iso for that tool (they provide links for many of them) and select the image once downloaded
  3. Select the drive letter of the USB flash drive you want to write to and click create (make sure you move any data you want to keep first as it write's over the contents)
That's it. You now have a bootable flash drive at your disposal. for some machines you may need to go into BIOS to tell the computer to attempt to boot from the USB first.

Need to update your tool?  - Download the latest version on iso and  run the tool again.

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