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I was wondering if anyone had recommendations for software to burn ISO images to a USB drive, and make the drive bootable.

I've MagicDisc, but wasn't a big fan of it, and it doesn't work on Windows 8. The Windows 7 USB DVD tool doesn't work for most of my ISOs either (most of my ISOs are WinPE disks).

Tried a program from CNET and it ended up being malware, so I figured I'd ask the community here before doing anything dumb.

Thanks!

Have you met Rufus?

ImgBurn. While primarily for optical disc, it will write bootable ISOs to USB sticks. It's dead-simple and dead-reliable.

Was coming here to post recommend ImgBurn, but misread the topic as burning ISOs to dvd drives. Didn't even know it had a function for USB, but I can vouch for it's reliability, I've used it for years on all sorts of machines.

Captain Ned wrote:

ImgBurn. While primarily for optical disc, it will write bootable ISOs to USB sticks. It's dead-simple and dead-reliable.

And it plays a happy little tune when it's done!

Universal USB Installer's pretty good, though more oriented at Linux distributions. Likewise UNetbootin.

Huh, I didn't know that about ImgBurn.

Oops, I was wrong. Several places said it was possible with ImgBurn but a quick test proves me wrong. My bad.

ImgBurn is my choice for optical but I found Rufus a while ago and it's perfect for flash drives.

Ars Technica has a good writeup about how to create a bootable USB drive using the command line. (http://arstechnica.com/business/2009/12 ... h-drive/2/)

Win32 Disk Imager (http://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/), WinToBootic (http://www.wintobootic.com/), and Rufus (http://rufus.akeo.ie/) look like they may be what you're looking for.

I've used Win32 Disk Imager before, and it's good for a barebones image writer.

RMprepUSB has been amazing for me. Nothing like installing Windows off a fast USB3 flash drive.

http://www.rmprepusb.com/

By far one of the best tools I have ever found is Yumi.
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-multi ... b-creator/

Yumi is a multiboot loader that does it all. Grabs the iso and creates a bootable usb fob.
I highly suggest you get at least Clonezilla and some partition manager on a bootable device.

If you take like a 128G device and create a 8 gig bootable partition and a 120 gig linux partiton you can run clonezilla from the first partition and back up to the second. Works really well and considering you get fairly good compression w/ clonezilla you can backit up a good size pc.

Compression being what it is your results may vary. You can do the same on a hard drive.

Supposedly for WinPE USB sticks you just need diskpart and xcopy.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/libr ... 30(v=ws.10).aspx

I used Rufus for Server 2012 and it seemed to work fine. (My SSD died right after but hopefully that's unrelated...)

I ended up using Rufus. I initiall installed ImgBurn, and it prompted me to install a lot of spyware/adware/crap. MBAM also signaled it's installer and another file as malware, so I cleaned it up, found it doesn't write to USB drives, and then removed it.

Rufus was fast, very simple, and worked extremely well.