Booting from USB Flash Drive

UncleZen

I have an old, well 2008, so its not that old, Asus EEE-PC 701 running some flavour of Linux.
I want to try out Android, just to see what its like on the platform, but without destroying the OS and applications on the SSD disk.
So I thought I would download the Android 4 ICS ISO and used Unetbootin to make a bootable USB drive and boot from that.
Except that when I boot from the USB drive the system reports that theres is no bootable OS on the device. So it looks to me like Unetbootin has not made a bootable USB device which its supposed to do.
Ive followed various instructions on the net and I cant work out why its not booting - can anyone shed any light?

Or alternatively suggest another way that I can either
1) run android without installing it on my Asus?
2) make a USB device bootable with an ISO image?

GunJack

Xboot works, creates bootable usb :-

https://sites.google.com/site/shamurxboot/

UncleZen

Thanks, I'll give that a go.

John_Gray

UNetbootin works for me - are you certain you pointed it at an ISO file?

UncleZen

the ISO file I used was the Andriod one downloaded from sourceforge. Unetbootin seems simple enough, unless theres a non-boot option I had selected but didnt notice.

UncleZen

Well, it appears that neither xboot or unetbootin will copy the bootable OS to the USB drive unless I am running with admin priviledges. I was running using a "limited" account from WinXP Home (as Im not in the habit of running as an admin - just in case). When I logged in as the administrator and repeated the build and boot process it worked as expected.
It would have been nice if it "told" me that, but I suppose thats a bit too much to ask.

prowla

I've used a HP boot utility that I found via google at http://www.bay-wolf.com/usbmemstick.htm.

John_Gray

UncleZen wrote: »

Well, it appears that neither xboot or unetbootin will copy the bootable OS to the USB drive unless I am running with admin privileges. ... It would have been nice if it "told" me that, but I suppose that's a bit too much to ask.

Unfortunately that's just one of the things you have to remember as a possible problem when something doesn't work...
Yes, it would be great if you got given a message "Performing this function requires you to run as an Administrator."
But, hey, this is Windows, right?!