Retrieving an OS from an Unetbootin USB Stick?
 

I like to look at new dristros while maintaining my preferred one. Only recently have I started using Unetbootin with a usb flash drive to install the newly downloaded distro. Is it possible to extract the distro from the Unetbootin usb flash drive and place it in a file, like Downloads, to be later used with unetbootin again?

Just make an image of the USB device, this way you can later just write it on the device, if needed.

Hi TobiSGD. Well, yeah, that makes perfect sense. :) I guess that I should have thought my question out a litle better before writing it. I think what I really want to have in my Downloads file is an .iso that can be placed on any media (CD/DVD/usb stick). I'm not sure how unetbootin turns an .iso into bootable form, so I'm just not sure what to extract from the USB stick.

Unetbootin extracts all files from the ISO to the USB device and then installs a bootloader to that device. So just copying a few files from the USB device would not work, since you aren't able to copy the bootloader this way. Therefore an image would be a better solution.
Keep in mind that nowadays many distributions use the hybrid-ISO format, so that you can simply copy the ISO to the USB device with dd or cat, no need for something like Unetbootin in those cases and the ISO itself is the image you want to have.

That's kinda what I do sometimes, keep a copy of the .iso that I downloaded.

If you use unetbootin you might be able to email the creators of it and ask them to unbootin a usb back to a iso. I doubt they'd do it but might offer you a clue how they wrote it.

It wouldn't be very hard to dd and image with compression to a file.

Consider using a virtual machine to test distro's if you system is good enough.

Check out this system snapshotting utility:
http://salinelinux.proboards.com/ind...ead=170&page=1

Also, web search "remastersys" and "refractasnapshot"