Hiren's BootCD: could burn .iso to disc, although unetbootin didn't "work"

[rybnik]

I was recently helping a friend with her badly infected windows computer. After a little research, I found out about HBCD (Hiren's Boot CD), which is a bootable OS that has a bunch of antivirus, antimalware, and general recovery tools preinstalled. I thought that's perfect, so I downloaded the .iso. I first tried making a bootable UFD (usb flash drive) of it in unetbootin. Unetbootin did something, since when I booted from the resultant UFD, it did give me a menu of a few of the programs that HBCD had, although it was missing a lot of stuff from the menu. So instead I burned an actual CD of the .iso through k3b--and that worked perfectly.

So here's my question:

It seems that the liveUSB creator softwares (such as unetbootin) do something that is either more than or different than what happens when burning an .iso to an actual CD/DVD. Is there a way to "burn" a UFD in a way that mimics burning a CD/DVD, without the extra/different stuff that liveUSB creators do?

[vinnywright]

look hear http://www.hirensbootcd.org/usb-booting/

VINNY

of course sence it's a windows box you may want this ..... http://www.dban.org/
just kiding ,,,,,DBAN will wipe the HD on boot , so dont do this .

[rybnik]

Oh, yes. I'll get on that now and report back on whether it worked.

Yes, DBAN is one the tools on HBCD. Does it overwrite with all 0's or all 1's or does it just delete the contents of drives it finds?

Thanks.

[vinnywright]

I think DBAN dose a random over write with multiple passes ......of course you could also do this with dd DBAN just dose it automatically on boot withought asking if your sure and on all drives it can find.

VINNY

[rybnik]

Thanks for the info on DBAN.

To clarify--my "consulting" with the windows box is over now, so now the only system I'm using is my own kubuntu box. I'm fiddling with HBCD just for my own curiosity. I followed the instructions for making a bootable UFD of HBCD, except instead of using their provided programs for formatting to FAT and installing grub, I did those things by, respectively, using gparted and using the grub-install command. Following the rest of the instructions verbatim, it didn't work out.

But never mind that--I don't care about HBCD, specifically, since I do have a working CD of it. I'm curious more about the difference between booting from CD vs. USB generally.

So... a couple questions I have, then. (Thanks to anyone who takes the time to respond.)

(1) Is it correct that when I do the "burn from .iso" option in k3b, it extracts the .iso and then merely dumps the extracted files on the CD? Is that all it does, or does it also install a bootloader that did not come from the .iso?
(2) If (1) is indeed the case, then what is it about booting from USB that's so different from booting from CD that the following happens?
(2.1) So I install a bootloader on my UFD with the grub-install command. Then I
(2.2) Extract the .iso and dump the extracted files on the UFD.
(2.3) And I realize that this doesn't produce a functional bootable UFD.

[rybnik]

Okay, so I see that I let the thread drift to different questions. I'll start a new thread for those, as my original question has been answered. (I was since able to make a bootable ufd of hfcd.)

Thanks, Vinny.

[vinnywright]

vinny