Sunday, October 17, 2010

UNetbootin (aka “Universal Netboot Installer”) - The “almost too easy” bootable Linux USB creation utility (with cool Windows admin/anti-malware/password recovery stuff included too)

“I came across an interesting utility called UNetbootin. It allows you to create bootable USB drives for many flavors of linux – but the part that interested me was the additional utilities you could write to a flash drive:
“UNetbootin allows you to create bootable Live USB drives for Ubuntu, Fedora, and other Linux distributions without burning a CD. It runs on both Windows and Linux. 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.
UNetbootin can also be used to load various system utilities, including:
Parted Magic, a partition manager that can resize, repair, backup, and restore partitions.
SystemRescueCD, a system repair, backup and recovery tool.
Super Grub Disk, a boot utility that can restore and repair overwritten and misconfigured GRUB installs or directly boot various operating systems
Dr.Web Antivirus, F-Secure Rescue CD, and Kaspersky Rescue Disk, which remove malware from Windows installs.
Backtrack, a utility used for network analysis and penetration testing.
Ophcrack, a utility which can recover Windows passwords.
NTPasswd, a utility which can reset Windows passwords and edit the registry.
Gujin, a graphical bootloader that can also be used to boot various operating systems and media.
Smart Boot Manager (SBM), which can boot off CD-ROM and floppy drives on computers with a faulty BIOS.
FreeDOS, which can run BIOS flash and other legacy DOS utilities.
Read more: Greg's Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day