How do I place a bootable ISO on a USB drive?

What's the best way of placing a bootable ISO on a USB drive, such that the drive is bootable? ISOs such as a live Linux preview disk, Windows installation ISO, etc.

Solution 1:

Look at the open-source, fast, free, easy and small Rufus:

Solution 2:

UNetbootin works very well, is easy to use with a simple wizard, and supports a broad range of Linux distros.

To install Windows from a flash drive, here is a post explaining how to install Windows 7 from a flash drive.

Solution 3:

Some ISO images already have the appropriate boot sector; for example, Arch Linux ISOs. In this case, all you need is to write the image using dd ... of=/dev/sda or similar. (Using a partition, sda1, will not work.)

But if the ISO image is not specially prepared to be used from a USB drive, you will have to copy the .iso file to the disk as an ordinary file – mount, cp, all that – and install a bootloader such as Syslinux or lilo or GRUB. (There already are several pages on the Internet on this topic.)