Hi, I am in a somewhat strange situation and need some help. I bought parts for a new computer, got just about everything put together and plugged in, then went to plug in the dvd drive, and couldn't find the ide connector on the motherboard. Turns out, I should have made sure it had one before deciding to keep using my ancient dvd drive rather than buying a new one.

So right now, my old computer is dismantled and the new computer is sitting there waiting for a boot device. The only place that sells dvd drives locally is almost 40 minutes away and wants $50 for something that costs $20 online. So, short of being patient and waiting for a new drive to be shipped, I'm thinking my best bet is to burn the iso to my flash drive and boot off that and worry about a dvd drive later.

But here's the twist. I am a Windows user, and the iso is going to be a windows install as well. The only computer I have access to right now, which I am using to type this, is a laptop with linux (debian/kde) installed, and I have no idea how to use it.

I copied the iso onto the computer, but I don't know how to burn it onto the flash drive and make it a bootable device. I have tried googling, but everything I found talked about applications which I don't know how to get or command prompts which I don't know how to do.

If anyone could please explain in terms a windows user can understand how to use linux to turn a flash drive into a bootable device with a windows iso, I would really appreciate it.

Thanks for any help.

I've had good success with unetbootin.

you can download and install unetbootin at your windows or Debian computer and then create a bootable flash drive from there with your desired Linux distribution.

Good Luck to you!

if the iso is a hybrid type you can use the dd command to write to the USB stick, otherwise as suggested above unetbootin does the job well.

1 members found this post helpful.

unetbootin is available in the ubuntu repositories but I have found that this version doesn't always work.
the standalone version from: http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ always worked well
this is the download url
http://ncu.dl.sourceforge.net/projec...otin-linux-585

after download you may have to right click on the file, open properties > permissions > and check: allow executing file as a program.
in persistence just choose a high number (higher than left-over space) and it reserves the rest of the flashdrive's space to save changes to the system, e.g. themes, newly installed apps

dd if=Your-Image.iso of=/dev/sdx bs=1M change the x to your usb device. now you have a bootable image I do this for cdrom.iso I want to test.

you can also boot the iso in grub2 check it out here

Be sure you KNOW what is what on the dd command!!!

Many of the more modern distro's easily write directly to a flash drive from an .iso file with a dd command for use to install. I use it all the time.

So you are stuck with windows. The suggestions for the www.pendrivelinux.com ways are OK. Some quite fast.

You could if you want, install a virtual machine and use a VM to create a boot usb from and iso.

Could get wild and create a pxe/gpxe/ipxe server on the windows and use it to boot your new system up if it has a pxe boot option.