What's the best way of placing a bootable ISO on a USB drive, such that the drive is bootable? ISOs such as a live Linux preview disk, Windows installation ISO, etc.
"Some ISO images already have the appropriate boot sector; for example, Arch Linux ISOs. In this case, all you need is to write the image using dd ... of=/dev/sda or similar. (Using a partition, sda1, will not work.)
But if the ISO image is not specially prepared to be used from a USB drive, you will have to copy the .iso file to the disk as an ordinary file – mount, cp, all that – and install a bootloader such as Syslinux or lilo or GRUB. (There already are several pages on the Internet on this topic.)"
UNetbootin allows you to create bootable Live USB drives for Ubuntu, Fedora, and other Linux distributions without burning a CD. It runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. You can either let UNetbootin 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." "Try UNetbootin:
UNetbootin allows you to create bootable Live USB drives for Ubuntu, Fedora, and other Linux distributions without burning a CD. It runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. You can either let UNetbootin 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."
"YUMI is a MultiBoot Live USB Creator that can be used to quickly and easily build custom bootable USB Flash Drives containing multiple Live Linux distributions, Windows installers, Antivirus tools, system diagnostic, and troubleshooting software of your choosing.
UNetbootin can create a bootable Live USB drive, or it can make a ""frugal install"" on your local hard disk if you don't have a USB drive. It can load distributions by automatically downloading their ISO image (CD image) files, or by using existing ISO files, floppy/hard disk images, or kernel/initrd files, for installing other distributions.
UNetbootin is freely available from Sourceforge (that's the link I gave). If you need additional binaries you can either repackage the ISO image you are using or (if it's not required at boot time) pick it up after the boot completes from another partition made on the same flash drive.
A couple of links that might be a useful as reference,
Create a Bootable Ubuntu Live USB (Ubuntu Feisty reference)
Instructions on how to update the Live CD and modify its contents are also given.
melux: a custom Ubuntu ISO image creation script
Melux is a Bash script which automates the creation of custom Ubuntu ISO images. It does nearly everything you would ever need to do: creates necessary working directories, mount-loops the original Ubuntu ISO image, copies its contents, mount-loops the squashfs file, copies its contents in a new dir and chroots in it where it modifies sources.lists and resolv.conf so that the chroot system is usable, and then presents a nice menu for the user to select which package groups to add."
