Create a bootable USB flash drive with UNetbootin

When you have a regular notebook with an optical drive, it’s no problem to burn a CD of a new operating system or software you want to try out. But what if you have a netbook? They usually don’t feature an optical CD/DVD drive and that’s where bootable USB flash drives come in handy.

Advantages of bootable USB sticks

There are some clear advantages of bootable USB flash drives over CDs/DVDs:

• Your notebook doesn’t have an optical drive or it’s broken
• You can carry around a fully functional operating system on your keyring
• Data can be stored on the flash drive while on Live CDs you can’t

Most likely you will want to install a Linux distribution like Ubuntu or a system utility like Super Grub Disk. A bootable USB drive can also come incredibly handy when you have to backup your broken computer, and there are a lot more scenarios.

ISO image to flash drive

Lucky for us, there is a tool which makes the process easy to get an ISO image on a flash drive and it’s called UNetbootin. You can create USB startup disks on your USB flash drive from various Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, PCLinuxOS, openSUSE and many more.
You can either let it download one of the many distributions supported out-of-the-box for you, or supply your own Linux ISO file if you’ve already downloaded one or your preferred distribution isn’t on the list.

Step-by-step instructions

Preliminary Note:

Although data on your USB stick should not be deleted, it is possible that UNetbootin could erase files during the process, so please back up your drive first.

What you need:

1. Download and install UNetbootin

2. Connect your flash drive to your computer

3. Open UNetbootin, select the Diskimage option and browse to your source ISO file (in case you don’t have one, select the Distribution option and a preferred image. The download will take a while)

4. Select your thumb drive and hit OK to start the installation

After UNetbootin is done, you should now be able to boot off the flash drive at startup. Reboot and make sure your computer boots from the USB drive. If it doesn’t work make you might have to change the boot order in the BIOS.

Conclusion

You really can’t do much wrong here, except you select the wrong destination drive which you can prevent by only showing mounted USB drives.
One final note, there might be the possibility that your machine will not boot from an USB drive. In this case try another OS but there is still the chance that it might not work. By the way, this also works with any other form of flash memory, like SD cards.

If you need a reliable flash drive with lots of storage, then please take a look at our USB flash drives category.