With all the various flavors of anti virus rescue CDs around, it’s an easy matter to create a CD bootable anti virus scanner that will operate offline to disinfect even the worst malware infestation. In most cases, all you have to do is download the vendor’s latest rescue CD ISO image, burn it, boot it, and let the program do its thing. Easy. Making a bootable USB thumb drive from the ISO is another matter.
Extracting the files from an ISO image to the thumb drive requires a few tricks to accomplish. You can, of course, just download my BLTDVS toolkit from How to make a bootable thumb drive virus scanner for NTFS: 2009 update, and follow the included instructions but, that toolkit is specifically optimized to work with the Kaspersky Rescue CD; what if you prefer to use a different vendor’s rescue package?
The answer is a cool open source utility called UNetbootin that allows you to create bootable live USB drives for a variety of Linux distributions without requiring you to burn a CD. This is perfect since most, if not all, of the rescue CDs are Linux based. The UNetbootin site has full instructions on how to use the tool complete with screen shots.
Of course, this makes my toolkit unnecessary, though not any less useful. I have no plans to retire the tool, however, since it’s one of the most popular posts here. But, just in case you’re wondering, I’m now using UNetbootin.
Cheers!
The Geek
