Is there a "universal" way of how you can make a bootable USB drive out of a bootable dvd or cd? What makes a USB drive bootable? What makes a dvd and cd bootable?
For example there is a program called UNetBootin which can make bootable USB drives, but seems like it only works with various linux distributions. (Tried it with a Win7 image and the SystemRescueCD, which didn't work so well…).
Main reason I ask is that I have a Support DVD which came with an Asus EEE, and it of course doesn't have an external dvd drive. So I am curious if I can sort of move that dvd over to a USB drive so that I can use it without buying one.
Not asking just specifically about this one case though, I am curious to know a bit more about this in general. So, if you have a general bootable DVD or CD (Or a DVD or CD image for that matter), could be linux distro, windows install disk, support disks, etc., is it possible to "move" it over to a USB drive and make that work like the DVD or CD did? (Being bootable and all).
Best Answer
See this post for instructions for how to take stuff that's on a bootable DVD and placing it on a USB drive that's bootable.
A USB Thumbdrive is just a hard drive, and if it's got the right boot files and the BIOS supports booting from an external USB hard drive it will work fine.
To understand what makes a CD or DVD drive bootable see this post on the El Torito (CD-ROM standard).