Introduction
My notebook’s cd/dvd drive is over a year old. Anyone with experience in dvd burner drives can tell you that after about a year they stop reading a lot of disks, then they eventually fail.. for those with notebooks it’s not quite so simple to repair. Luckily if you use Linux you aren’t forced to install your OS via CD or DVD rom media.
Requirement?
1GB flash media for LiveCD distros, or 2GB+ for full blown DVD installers. This method won’t work if your distro needs mutiple dvd disks.
How?
Simply using DD or Unetbootin, you can turn an ISO file into a bootable USB flash stick. While Unetbootin is good for noobs because of it’s graphical interface, my way is much easier and faster. This should work on MOST distros:
dd if=image.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M
Simply replace image.iso with the filename, and sdX with the appropriate device name. bs=4M is the block size (this can be left alone).
Editor’s note: Due to Windows being pretty shitty, it may think your flash drive is a CDROM. It may also have issues turning your flash drive back into a removable storage device. To solve these issues simply use your favorite linux partition software to restore the file system as you would on an HDD.
