Personal computing discussed

Moderators: renee, Dposcorp

 
lonleyppl
Gerbil XP
Topic Author
Posts: 380
Joined: Wed Jan 26, 2011 2:59 pm

Software for burning ISOs to USB drives

Fri Nov 08, 2013 12:17 pm

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!
Lenovo W520
IBM dx340
Nokia Lumia 928
Sony a7 with far too many lenses to list or even count
 
drfish
Gerbil Elder
Posts: 5546
Joined: Wed Jan 22, 2003 7:53 pm
Location: Zeeland, MI

Re: Software for burning ISOs to USB drives

Fri Nov 08, 2013 12:26 pm

Have you met Rufus?
 
Captain Ned
Global Moderator
Posts: 28704
Joined: Wed Jan 16, 2002 7:00 pm
Location: Vermont, USA

Re: Software for burning ISOs to USB drives

Fri Nov 08, 2013 1:02 pm

ImgBurn. While primarily for optical disc, it will write bootable ISOs to USB sticks. It's dead-simple and dead-reliable.
What we have today is way too much pluribus and not enough unum.
 
SuperSpy
Minister of Gerbil Affairs
Posts: 2403
Joined: Thu Sep 12, 2002 9:34 pm
Location: TR Forums

Re: Software for burning ISOs to USB drives

Fri Nov 08, 2013 1:05 pm

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.
Desktop: i7-4790K @4.8 GHz | 32 GB | EVGA Gefore 1060 | Windows 10 x64
Laptop: MacBook Pro 2017 2.9GHz | 16 GB | Radeon Pro 560
 
drsauced
Gerbil Jedi
Posts: 1543
Joined: Mon Apr 21, 2003 1:38 pm
Location: Here!

Re: Software for burning ISOs to USB drives

Fri Nov 08, 2013 1:18 pm

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!
Calm seas never made a skilled mariner. But, sadly I'm an A's fan.
 
bthylafh
Maximum Gerbil
Posts: 4320
Joined: Mon Dec 29, 2003 11:55 pm
Location: Southwest Missouri, USA

Re: Software for burning ISOs to USB drives

Fri Nov 08, 2013 1:26 pm

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

Huh, I didn't know that about ImgBurn.
Hakkaa päälle!
i7-8700K|Asus Z-370 Pro|32GB DDR4|Asus Radeon RX-580|Samsung 960 EVO 1TB|1988 Model M||Logitech MX 518 & F310|Samsung C24FG70|Dell 2209WA|ATH-M50x
 
Captain Ned
Global Moderator
Posts: 28704
Joined: Wed Jan 16, 2002 7:00 pm
Location: Vermont, USA

Re: Software for burning ISOs to USB drives

Fri Nov 08, 2013 1:54 pm

Oops, I was wrong. Several places said it was possible with ImgBurn but a quick test proves me wrong. My bad. :oops:
What we have today is way too much pluribus and not enough unum.
 
drfish
Gerbil Elder
Posts: 5546
Joined: Wed Jan 22, 2003 7:53 pm
Location: Zeeland, MI

Re: Software for burning ISOs to USB drives

Fri Nov 08, 2013 2:19 pm

ImgBurn is my choice for optical but I found Rufus a while ago and it's perfect for flash drives.
 
Flatland_Spider
Graphmaster Gerbil
Posts: 1324
Joined: Mon Sep 13, 2004 8:33 pm

Re: Software for burning ISOs to USB drives

Fri Nov 08, 2013 2:42 pm

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.
 
ChronoReverse
Gerbil Elite
Posts: 757
Joined: Wed Dec 12, 2007 4:20 pm

Re: Software for burning ISOs to USB drives

Fri Nov 08, 2013 3:00 pm

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

http://www.rmprepusb.com/
 
joerock
Gerbil In Training
Posts: 1
Joined: Fri Nov 08, 2013 4:05 pm

Re: Software for burning ISOs to USB drives

Fri Nov 08, 2013 4:19 pm

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.
 
Flying Fox
Gerbil God
Posts: 25690
Joined: Mon May 24, 2004 2:19 am
Contact:

Re: Software for burning ISOs to USB drives

Fri Nov 08, 2013 4:35 pm

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

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/libr ... 30(v=ws.10).aspx
The Model M is not for the faint of heart. You either like them or hate them.

Gerbils unite! Fold for UnitedGerbilNation, team 2630.
 
mako
Gerbil First Class
Posts: 106
Joined: Sat Oct 30, 2004 6:09 pm
Location: North Bay

Re: Software for burning ISOs to USB drives

Fri Nov 08, 2013 5:31 pm

I used Rufus for Server 2012 and it seemed to work fine. (My SSD died right after but hopefully that's unrelated...)
E3-1230v2 | GA-6UASL3 | 16 GB ECC | Seagate 600 240GB | HGST 4TB | GTX 660 | Silverstone TJ08-E | Seasonic X650 | Win Server 2012 | Dell U2713HM || Zotac CI320
 
lonleyppl
Gerbil XP
Topic Author
Posts: 380
Joined: Wed Jan 26, 2011 2:59 pm

Re: Software for burning ISOs to USB drives

Mon Nov 11, 2013 5:34 pm

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.
Lenovo W520
IBM dx340
Nokia Lumia 928
Sony a7 with far too many lenses to list or even count

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest
GZIP: On