Hmmm....CD/DVD Drive Dead...What to do? Answer: unetbootin

With what little free time I have these days I've slowly been trying to get my Mame cabinet back in order. For any of you that don't know the history of my Mame cabinet I purchased the Mame cabinet completely built already but outdated. It had an old arcade monitor with severe burn-in from years of Ms Pacman. And the computer inside was an old Pentium I that was running DOS. Without going to far in depth in this particular post I took out that old box and replaced with a much more advanced PC. It was running Windows XP. The other night I decided that it was time to switch back to an old friend: Linux Mint.

No big deal, just downloaded the latest distro of Mint and burned a copy to a CD. After some extended reaching inside of the cabinet trying to reach the DVD drive I found that the computer would not boot on the CD. After a few minutes of trouble shooting it became fairly evident that the drive was not working. It would start to read the disc but just give up.

So, I went to my key chain and pulled off my 2gig memory stick that I keep with me for emergencies and decided to go with putting Mint on it instead. Did a quick bit of research and looking in the BIOS to confirm that my motherboard supported booting to a USB device which it would.

Next, since it's not something I really deal with much I had to find how I was going to put it on the USB drive. Did a quick google and the first thing that came up was: unetbootin

Now again I don't have a whole lot of experience looking for software like this but I was very pleased with what I found. Not only would it take an ISO and put it on a USB drive but it comes with built-in support for automatically downloading many different Linux & BSD Distro's. Ubunta, Debian, Mint, OpenSUSE, FreeBSD, and many others. I noticed such as in Mint that maybe one or more are a version behind but I just thought that was an outright cool idea. They also allow direct installation straight on to a local hard drive. And of course you can you pretty much any distro that you can find a ISO for.

http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/unetbootin/wiki