Having read this thread and many others on the same subject I have found a quick and simple way to make bootable USB sticks - it's almost effortless providing you have access to a PC running Windows.
You need two utilities, the first is the
HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool. The latest version of this utility is v2.1.8 - I downloaded a copy from
here. If you know that your USB pen drive is bootable then you don't need this utility. [
Note: Two out of the three USB sticks I tried failed to boot before I used this tool - now all three boot just fine.] If your PC fails to boot from your USB stick even when the BIOS is set to boot from 'USB-Zip' then format the stick as FAT / FAT32 using this HP utility.
The second utility you need is
UltraISO - the trial version of
UltraISO can be downloaded from
here. Simply open your bootable ISO image file in
UltraISO and then from the menu select
Bootable ->
Write Disk Image... Make sure that your USB pen drive is selected as the '
Disk Drive:' and that the '
Write Method:' is set to
USB-ZIP. Then just click on
Write and in a few seconds you will have a bootable USB pen drive.
Voila - it really is that simple!
Enjoy.