Convert Any Live CD to a Bootable Thumb Drive in Minutes

A visitor to my Ask the Geek site told me about a great little utility, UNetbootin for Windows and Linux that allows you to create bootable Live USB drives for a variety of Linux distributions without requiring you to burn a CD. Not only that, but UNetbootin can be used to load system utilities, including:

• Parted Magic, a partition manager that can resize, repair, backup, and restore partitions.
• SystemRescueCD, a system repair, backup and recovery tool.
• Super Grub Disk, a boot utility that can restore and repair overwritten and mis-configured GRUB installs or directly boot various operating systems
• Dr.Web Antivirus, F-Secure Rescue CD, and Kaspersky Rescue Disk, which remove malware from Windows installs.
• Backtrack, a utility used for network analysis and penetration testing.
• Ophcrack, a utility which can recover Windows passwords.
• NTPasswd, a utility which can reset Windows passwords and edit the registry.
• Gujin, a graphical bootloader that can also be used to boot various operating systems and media.
• Smart Boot Manager (SBM), which can boot off CD-ROM and floppy drives on computers with a faulty BIOS.
• FreeDOS, which can run BIOS flash and other legacy DOS utilities.

The tool works like a charm. I’ve made bootable USB drives with ClamAV Live CD, the Kaspersky Rescue Disk, Dr. Web Antivirus, and a couple of others, just to see how it works. These are invaluable tools for we security wonks and I thought I’d pass it on.

Be sure to check out the UNetbootin site for complete information and tutorials on how to make it work.